[IPython-dev] IPython 0.6.1 is officially out

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

I've just uplodaded officially IPython 0.6.1.  Many thanks to all who 
contributed comments, bug reports, ideas and patches.  I'd like in particular 
to thank Ville Vainio, who helped a lot with many of the features for pysh, 
and was willing to put code in front of his ideas.

As always, a big Thank You goes to Enthought and the Scipy crowd for hosting 
ipython and all its attending support services (bug tracker, mailing lists, 
website and downloads, etc).

The download location, as usual, is:

http://ipython.scipy.org/dist

A detailed NEWS file can be found here: http://ipython.scipy.org/NEWS, so I 
won't repeat it.  I will only mention the highlights of this released compared 
to 0.6.0:

* BACKWARDS-INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE:  Users will need to update their ipythonrc 
files and replace '%n' with '\D' in their prompt_in2 settings everywhere. 
Sorry, but there's otherwise no clean way to get all prompts to properly 
align.  The ipythonrc shipped with IPython has been updated.

* 'pysh' profile, which allows you to use ipython as a system shell.  This 
includes mechanisms for easily capturing shell output into python strings and 
lists, and for expanding python variables back to the shell.  It is started, 
like all profiles, with 'ipython -p pysh'.  The following is a brief example 
of the possibilities:

planck[~/test]|3> $$a=ls *.py
planck[~/test]|4> type(a)
               <4> <type 'list'>
planck[~/test]|5> for f in a:
               |.>     if f.startswith('e'):
               |.>         wc -l $f
               |.>
113 error.py
9 err.py
2 exit2.py
10 exit.py

You can get the necessary profile into your ~/.ipython directory by running 
'ipython -upgrade', or by copying it from the IPython/UserConfig directory 
(ipythonrc-pysh).  Note that running -upgrade will rename your existing config 
files to prevent clobbering them with new ones.

This feature had been long requested by many users, and it's at last 
officially part of ipython.

* Improved the @alias mechanism.  It is now based on a fast, lightweight 
dictionary implementation, which was a requirement for making the pysh 
functionality possible.  A new pair of magics, @rehash and @rehashx, allow you 
to load ALL of your $PATH into ipython as aliases at runtime.

* New plot2 function added to the Gnuplot support module, to plot dictionaries 
and lists/tuples of arrays.  Also added automatic EPS generation to hardcopy().

* History is now profile-specific.

* New @bookmark magic to keep a list of directory bookmarks for quick navigation.

* New mechanism for profile-specific persistent data storage.  Currently only 
the new @bookmark system uses it, but it can be extended to hold arbitrary 
picklable data in the future.

* New @system_verbose magic to view all system calls made by ipython.

* For Windows users:  all this functionality now works under Windows, but some 
external libraries are required.  Details here: 
http://ipython.scipy.org/doc/manual/node2.html#sub:Under-Windows

* Fix bugs with '_' conflicting with the gettext library.

* Many, many other bugfixes and minor enhancements.  See the NEWS file linked 
above for the full details.

Enjoy, and please report any problems.

Best,

Fernando Perez.