[IPython-dev] New zeromq-based console now in trunk

[David Warde-Farley]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 04:40:18PM -0700, Fernando Perez wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We've just pushed the 'newkernel' branch into trunk, so all that the
> recent work is now fully merged.  The big user-facing news is a new
> application, called 'ipython-qtconsole', that provides a rich widget
> with the feel of a terminal but many improved features such as
> multiline editing, syntax highlighting, graphical tooltips, inline
> plots, the ability to restart the kernel without losing user history,
> and more.  Attached is a screenshot showing some of these features.
> 
> At this point we know there are still rough edges, but we think the
> code is in a shape good enough for developers to start testing it, and
> filing tickets on our bug tracker
> (http://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues) for any problems you
> encounter.

Hey Fernando,

I shared this (incl the screenshot) around my new lab (very heavy users
of Python already) and there were oohs and ahhs from all directions. 
Nice work!

I did try it out last night and was having trouble to the effect of the
kernel dying almost immediately and a backtrace being printed to the console. 
This was in a virtualenv, is it known to play nice with virtualenv? (it was
on a pretty standard Ubuntu 10.04 netbook.)


> If you want to start playing with this code, you will need (in
> addition to IPython trunk):
> 
> ZeroMQ and its python bindings, Pyzqm, version 2.0.8:
> 
>     * http://www.zeromq.org/local--files/area:download/zeromq-2.0.8.tar.gz
>     * http://github.com/downloads/zeromq/pyzmq/pyzmq-2.0.8.tar.gz

I was using zeromq and pyzmq from their respective trunks, and that
was a bad idea. I'll try it out with stable and file a bug if I'm still
having problems. 

Again, it's fantastic to see it coming together.

David