A couple of times now I’ve been amazed over how many people who is still unaware of the IPython. From the IPython webpage, a very short summary of what IPython is “Enhanced interactive Python shell”. The python programming language is surrounded its interpreter, which facilitates dynamic typing and execution. This feature sufficiently increases productivity as there is no problem to test and try code snippets on-the-fly.

The IPython is a further extension of the standard python interpreter, as IPython provides more features in the python shell, such as auto-completion of imported modules, syntax highlightning, colors, and a variouse other usefull commands and features.

IPython is highly flexible in terms of providing the user with the possibility to extend the python shell even further with custom commands (called magic commands). There is also an even tigther integration between the python interpreter and the underlying shell, such as bash,csh, etc. It is for instance much simpler to list files and folders, by just typing “ls” directly into the shell. Even commands such as “mkdir”, “mv”, “rm” is builtin, and its trivial to further extend the shell command vocabulary with more complex commands. We’ll show an example for howto extend with custom commands below.

As every flexible software, IPython comes with a main configuration file ($HOME/.ipython/ipythonrc). If we wanted a custom command, such as “chmod <mod> <file>” (chmod 755 myfile.py), we could add this to the “ipythonrc” file:

Also, debugging lists (tuples, dictionaries, etc) is more readable within the IPython, as it wraps all such print statements inside the “pprint” (pretty-print) module, and therefore a comprehensible representation will find place.

So, if you often find yourself in the python interpreter, I would highly recommend you spending a half an hour to get to known IPython. I promise you – it will save you a lot of headaches in the future.