[Numpy-discussion] ANN: IPython 0.6.1 is officially out

Fernando Perez Fernando.Perez at colorado.edu
Mon Jul 26 18:19:10 EDT 2004


[Please forgive the cross-post, but since I know many scipy/numpy users are 
also ipython users, and this is a fairly significant update, I decided it was 
worth doing it.]

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.




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