Tuesday, August 02, 2011

IPython & PyDev

In the current nightly build (see: http://pydev.org/download.html to get it), IPython can be used as the backend for the PyDev interactive console.

IPython is a Python shell that provides many improvements over the standard Python shell (more details may be found at http://ipython.org/ ).

To use it, install IPython (0.10.x or 0.11) in your Python interpreter (if you use easy-install, just do easy_install ipython), make sure that the IPython paths are properly added in your interpreter configuration inside of PyDev ( http://pydev.org/manual_101_interpreter.html ) and start up the interactive console in PyDev ( http://pydev.org/manual_adv_interactive_console.html ). If all is properly configured, the interactive shell should use IPython as the backend (if it's not found, it'll fallback to the standard PyDev shell and warn that IPython could not be found).

Another improvement in the shell is that the output for a long running command will now be printed while it's executing, and not only after it returns.

I'm waiting for feedback to know if there's something missing in the integration before a final release is provided with the integration...