docs/source/config/details.rst

=======================
Specific config details
=======================

.. _custom_prompts:

Custom Prompts
==============

.. versionchanged:: 5.0

From IPython 5, prompts are produced as a list of Pygments tokens, which are
tuples of (token_type, text). You can customise prompts by writing a method
which generates a list of tokens.

There are four kinds of prompt:

* The **in** prompt is shown before the first line of input
  (default like ``In [1]:``).
* The **continuation** prompt is shown before further lines of input
  (default like ``...:``).
* The **rewrite** prompt is shown to highlight how special syntax has been
  interpreted (default like ``----->``).
* The **out** prompt is shown before the result from evaluating the input
  (default like ``Out[1]:``).

Custom prompts are supplied together as a class. If you want to customise only
some of the prompts, inherit from :class:`IPython.terminal.prompts.Prompts`,
which defines the defaults. The required interface is like this:

.. class:: MyPrompts(shell)

   Prompt style definition. *shell* is a reference to the
   :class:`~.TerminalInteractiveShell` instance.

   .. method:: in_prompt_tokens(cli=None)
               continuation_prompt_tokens(self, cli=None, width=None)
               rewrite_prompt_tokens()
               out_prompt_tokens()

      Return the respective prompts as lists of ``(token_type, text)`` tuples.

      For continuation prompts, *width* is an integer representing the width of
      the prompt area in terminal columns.

      *cli*, where used, is the prompt_toolkit ``CommandLineInterface`` instance.
      This is mainly for compatibility with the API prompt_toolkit expects.

Inside IPython or in a startup script, you can use a custom prompts class
by setting ``get_ipython().prompts`` to an *instance* of the class.
In configuration, ``TerminalInteractiveShell.prompts_class`` may be set to
either the class object, or a string of its full importable name.

.. _termcolour:

Terminal Colors
===============

.. versionchanged:: 5.0

There are two main configuration options controlling colours.

``InteractiveShell.colors`` sets the colour of tracebacks and object info (the
output from e.g. ``zip?``). It may also affect other things if the option below
is set to ``'legacy'``. It has four case-insensitive values:
``'nocolor', 'neutral', 'linux', 'lightbg'``. The default is *neutral*, which
should be legible on either dark or light terminal backgrounds. *linux* is
optimised for dark backgrounds and *lightbg* for light ones.

``TerminalInteractiveShell.highlight_style`` determines prompt colours and syntax
highlighting. It takes the name of a Pygments style as a string, or the special
value ``'legacy'`` to pick a style in accordance with ``InteractiveShell.colors``.

You can see the Pygments styles available on your system by running::

    import pygments
    list(pygments.styles.get_all_styles())

Additionally, ``TerminalInteractiveShell.highlight_style_overrides`` can override
specific styles in the highlighting. It should be a dictionary mapping Pygments
token types to strings defining the style. See `Pygments' documentation
<http://pygments.org/docs/styles/#creating-own-styles>`__ for the language used
to define styles.

Colors in the pager
-------------------

On some systems, the default pager has problems with ANSI colour codes.
To configure your default pager to allow these:

1. Set the environment PAGER variable to ``less``.
2. Set the environment LESS variable to ``-r`` (plus any other options
   you always want to pass to less by default). This tells less to
   properly interpret control sequences, which is how color
   information is given to your terminal.

.. _editors:

Editor configuration
====================

IPython can integrate with text editors in a number of different ways:

* Editors (such as `(X)Emacs`_, vim_ and TextMate_) can
  send code to IPython for execution.

* IPython's ``%edit`` magic command can open an editor of choice to edit
  a code block.

The %edit command (and its alias %ed) will invoke the editor set in your
environment as :envvar:`EDITOR`. If this variable is not set, it will default
to vi under Linux/Unix and to notepad under Windows. You may want to set this
variable properly and to a lightweight editor which doesn't take too long to
start (that is, something other than a new instance of Emacs). This way you
can edit multi-line code quickly and with the power of a real editor right
inside IPython.

You can also control the editor by setting :attr:`TerminalInteractiveShell.editor`
in :file:`ipython_config.py`.

Vim
---

Paul Ivanov's `vim-ipython <https://github.com/ivanov/vim-ipython>`_ provides
powerful IPython integration for vim.

.. _emacs:

(X)Emacs
--------

If you are a dedicated Emacs user, and want to use Emacs when IPython's
``%edit`` magic command is called you should set up the Emacs server so that
new requests are handled by the original process. This means that almost no
time is spent in handling the request (assuming an Emacs process is already
running). For this to work, you need to set your EDITOR environment variable
to 'emacsclient'. The code below, supplied by Francois Pinard, can then be
used in your :file:`.emacs` file to enable the server:

.. code-block:: common-lisp

    (defvar server-buffer-clients)
    (when (and (fboundp 'server-start) (string-equal (getenv "TERM") 'xterm))
      (server-start)
      (defun fp-kill-server-with-buffer-routine ()
        (and server-buffer-clients (server-done)))
      (add-hook 'kill-buffer-hook 'fp-kill-server-with-buffer-routine))

Thanks to the work of Alexander Schmolck and Prabhu Ramachandran,
currently (X)Emacs and IPython get along very well in other ways.

With (X)EMacs >= 24, You can enable IPython in python-mode with:

.. code-block:: common-lisp

    (require 'python)
    (setq python-shell-interpreter "ipython")

.. _`(X)Emacs`: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
.. _TextMate: http://macromates.com/
.. _vim: http://www.vim.org/