[IPython-dev] New GUI integration in IPython

[Fernando Perez]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 9:42 AM, Brian Granger <ellisonbg.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> As Fernando mentions, something like the old -pylab switch with be there.
> My own preference is to make it a magic like:
>
> In [1]: %pylab
>
> To emphasize that it is not something you *have* to choose at startup.  But
> we will definitely have something like this.

Yes, as you point out this is another *major* win I forgot to stress
in my reply.  I can't remember how many times in the past I've been
bitten by this (long running session started without -pylab, now I
need to plot something, don't want to lose my session... argh!).

I just think (I made a similar comment in my branch review) that
having a command-line flag also is a good thing for some of these
things, because then people have the convenience of aliasing
'pylab==ipython -pylab', for example.

Since pylab is such a common use and we have a lot of existing
documentation out there with that pattern, it's probably worth
preserving the convenience flag.  But the key point here, as you point
out, is how this becomes all just one more run-time function, instead
of the nasty special-case startup hack we had before.

Cheers,

f