IPython is an amazing replacement for the standard Python shell. As a result of this talk, I've already switched.
- It's embeddable so that you can add a shell into your existing applications.
- You can even use it as a replacement for your UNIX shell because it's so easy to interact with UNIX command line utilities.
- He mentioned "ipython -p tutorial", but I can't figure out what it does.
- It has better introspection, tab completion, color, syntax highlighting, and debugger integration.
- It was inspired by Mathematica.
- It has macros.
- It takes care of moving content to and from your editor so you don't have to cut and paste and remove the ">>>" at the beginning of each line.
- It can trivially lookup code definitions and docs while you're working on something.
- It has a better version of the "dir" function.
- It has various, useful "magic" commands.
- Doing things like "!ls" lets you talk to the shell. In this way, it's easy to do some UNIX shell scripting.
- It has support for timing and profiling.
- It has a nicer version of pdb called ipdb.
- In stack traces, it can show the syntax highlighted code as well as all the data.
- You can use ipython to dynamically code GUIs that have event loops that would block the normal interpreter.
- In general, ipython knows how to work with the event loops of many different libraries.
Comments
A: It takes care of the ">>>" and "..." at the beginning of each line.