[IPython-dev] IPython (new) + matplotlib report: happy news

[Fernando Perez]

Hey,

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 8:21 AM, John Hunter <jdh2358 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> How about this as an alternative: on my box, I can drag the "source
> code" link from the browser into my terminal, which by default pastes
> the URL of the referenced *.py into the terminal.  If "run" supported
> a -w (web) option, or automatically detected that the URL starts with
> http, it could do a web run of the file.  Of course, you may want the
> source code pasted in for illustrative purposes... To support this,
> you could add a -u (url) option to "paste" which assumes the input is
> a url, fetches it, and pastes the contents into ipython.  So you could
> type "paste -u" and then drag the link into the terminal, and it would
> fetch it and paste the code into an input block.

I'll play with those ideas, good thoughts.  %paste may not be the best
location because paste is now a terminal-only magic, since gui clients
have 'real' paste.  What's a little trickier now is that we really
need to think all the time in terms of completely separate kernel and
client codes, that only communicate via messages.  So a magic can't
muck with code in the client, because the magic executes inside the
kernel and the client is in a separate process (and possibly in a
separate computer).  While this is a bit more constraining, it forces
us to have a clean separation between different kinds of
functionality.

We've toyed with the idea of enabling a special syntax for *purely
client side* commands, something like

:cmd

that would never be sent to the kernel, and would be something for the
client to process internally.  But we'll have to mull this a little
longer...

One very important point in all of this is that the client *may not be
written in Python*.  All we have is a messaging protocol, the client
could be a web browser or anything else.

But in any case, I'll play with ways to expose this that are as easy
as possible for the users thanks for the feedback.

Cheers,

f