8.x Series
IPython 8.0
IPython 8.0 is still in alpha/beta stage. Please help us improve those release notes by sending PRs that modify docs/source/whatsnew/version8.rst
IPython 8.0 is bringing a large number of new features and improvements to both the user of the terminal and of the kernel via Jupyter. The removal of compatibility with older version of Python is also the opportunity to do a couple of performance improvement in particular with respect to startup time. The 8.x branch started diverging from its predecessor around IPython 7.12 (January 2020).
This release contains 250+ Pull Requests, in addition to many of the features and backports that have made it to the 7.x branch. All PRs that went into this released are properly tagged with the 8.0 milestone if you wish to have a more in depth look at the changes.
Please fell free to send pull-requests to updates those notes after release, I have likely forgotten a few things reviewing 250+ PRs.
Dependencies changes/downstream packaging
Note that most of our building step have been changes to be (mostly) declarative and follow PEP 517, we are trying to completely remove setup.py (:ghpull:`13238`) and are looking for help to do so.
- Minimum supported traitlets version if now 5+
- we now require stack_data
- Minimal Python is now 3.8
- nose is not a testing requirement anymore
- pytest replaces nose.
- iptest/iptest3 cli entrypoints do not exists anymore.
- minimum officially support numpy version has been bumped, but this should not have much effect on packaging.
Deprecation and removal
We removed almost all features, arguments, functions, and modules that were marked as deprecated between IPython 1.0 and 5.0. As reminder 5.0 was released in 2016, and 1.0 in 2013. Last release of the 5 branch was 5.10.0, in may 2020. The few remaining deprecated features we left have better deprecation warnings or have been turned into explicit errors for better error messages.
I will use this occasion to add the following requests to anyone emitting a deprecation warning:
- Please at at least stacklevel=2 so that the warning is emitted into the caller context, and not the callee one.
- Please add since which version something is deprecated.
As a side note it is much easier to deal with conditional comparing to versions numbers than try/except when a functionality change with version.
I won't list all the removed features here, but modules like IPython.kernel, which was just a shim module around ipykernel for the past 8 years have been remove, and so many other similar things that pre-date the name Jupyter itself.
We no longer need to add IPyhton.extensions to the PYTHONPATH because that is being handled by load_extension.
We are also removing Cythonmagic, sympyprinting and rmagic as they are now in other packages and no longer need to be inside IPython.
Documentation
Majority of our docstrings have now been reformatted and automatically fixed by the experimental VĂ©lin project, to conform to numpydoc.
Type annotations
While IPython itself is highly dynamic and can't be completely typed, many of the function now have type annotation, and part of the codebase and now checked by mypy.
Featured changes
Here is a features list of changes in IPython 8.0. This is of course non-exhaustive. Please note as well that many features have been added in the 7.x branch as well (and hence why you want to read the 7.x what's new notes), in particular features contributed by QuantStack (with respect to debugger protocol, and Xeus Python), as well as many debugger features that I was please to implement as part of my work at QuanSight and Sponsored by DE Shaw.
Better Tracebacks
The first on is the integration of the stack_data package; which provide smarter informations in traceback; in particular it will highlight the AST node where an error occurs which can help to quickly narrow down errors.
For example in the following snippet:
def foo(i): x = [[[0]]] return x[0][i][0] def bar(): return foo(0) + foo( 1 ) + foo(2)
Calling bar() would raise an IndexError on the return line of foo, IPython 8.0 is capable of telling you, where the index error occurs:
IndexError Input In [2], in <module> ----> 1 bar() ^^^^^ Input In [1], in bar() 6 def bar(): ----> 7 return foo(0) + foo( ^^^^ 8 1 ^^^^^^^^ 9 ) + foo(2) ^^^^ Input In [1], in foo(i) 1 def foo(i): 2 x = [[[0]]] ----> 3 return x[0][i][0] ^^^^^^^
Corresponding location marked here with ^ will show up highlighted in terminal and notebooks.
Autosuggestons
Autosuggestion is a very useful feature available in fish, zsh, and prompt-toolkit.
Ptpython allows users to enable this feature in ptpython/config.py.
This feature allows users to accept autosuggestions with ctrl e, ctrl f, or right arrow as described below.
- Start ipython
- Run print("hello")
- start typing print again to see the autosuggestion
- Press ctrl-f, or ctrl-e, or right-arrow to accept the suggestion
You can also complete word by word:
- Run def say_hello(): print("hello")
- Start typing the first letter if def to see the autosuggestion
- Press alt-f (or escape followed by f), to accept the first word of the suggestion
Importantly, this feature does not interfere with tab completion:
- After running def say_hello(): print("hello"), press d
- Press Tab to start tab completion
3A. Press Tab again to select the first option
3B. Press alt f (escape, f) to accept to accept the first word of the suggestion
3C. Press ctrl-f or ctrl-e to accept the entire suggestion
Currently, autosuggestions are only shown in the emacs or vi insert editing modes:
- The ctrl e, ctrl f, and alt f shortcuts work by default in emacs mode.
- To use these shortcuts in vi insert mode, you will have to create custom keybindings in your config.py.
Show pinfo information in ipdb using "?" and "??"
In IPDB, it is now possible to show the information about an object using "?" and "??", in much the same way it can be done when using the IPython prompt:
ipdb> partial? Init signature: partial(self, /, *args, **kwargs) Docstring: partial(func, *args, **keywords) - new function with partial application of the given arguments and keywords. File: ~/.pyenv/versions/3.8.6/lib/python3.8/functools.py Type: type Subclasses:
Previously, pinfo or pinfo2 command had to be used for this purpose.
Autoreload 3 feature
Example: When an IPython session is ran with the 'autoreload' extension loaded, you will now have the option '3' to select which means the following:
- replicate all functionality from option 2
- autoload all new funcs/classes/enums/globals from the module when they are added
- autoload all newly imported funcs/classes/enums/globals from external modules
Try %autoreload 3 in an IPython session after running %load_ext autoreload
For more information please see the following unit test : extensions/tests/test_autoreload.py:test_autoload_newly_added_objects
History Range Glob feature
Previously, when using %history, users could specify either a range of sessions and lines, for example:
~8/1-~6/5 # see history from the first line of 8 sessions ago, # to the fifth line of 6 sessions ago.``
Or users could specify a glob pattern:
-g <pattern> # glob ALL history for the specified pattern.
However users could not specify both.
If a user did specify both a range and a glob pattern, then the glob pattern would be used (globbing all history) and the range would be ignored.
With this enhancement, if a user specifies both a range and a glob pattern, then the glob pattern will be applied to the specified range of history.
Don't start a multi line cell with sunken parenthesis
From now on IPython will not ask for the next line of input when given a single line with more closing than opening brackets. For example, this means that if you (mis)type ]] instead of [], a SyntaxError will show up, instead of the ...: prompt continuation.
IPython shell for ipdb interact
The ipdb interact starts an IPython shell instead of Python's built-in code.interact().
Automatic Vi prompt stripping
When pasting code into IPython, it will strip the leading prompt characters if there are any. For example, you can paste the following code into the console - it will still work, even though each line is prefixed with prompts (In, Out):
In [1]: 2 * 2 == 4 Out[1]: True In [2]: print("This still works as pasted")
Previously, this was not the case for the Vi-mode prompts:
In [1]: [ins] In [13]: 2 * 2 == 4 ...: Out[13]: True ...: File "<ipython-input-1-727bb88eaf33>", line 1 [ins] In [13]: 2 * 2 == 4 ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax
This is now fixed, and Vi prompt prefixes - [ins] and [nav] - are skipped just as the normal In would be.
IPython shell can be started in the Vi mode using ipython --TerminalInteractiveShell.editing_mode=vi, You should be able to change mode dynamically with %config TerminalInteractiveShell.editing_mode='vi'
Empty History Ranges
A number of magics that take history ranges can now be used with an empty range. These magics are:
- %save
- %load
- %pastebin
- %pycat
Using them this way will make them take the history of the current session up to the point of the magic call (such that the magic itself will not be included).
Therefore it is now possible to save the whole history to a file using simple %save <filename>, load and edit it using %load (makes for a nice usage when followed with :kbd:`F2`), send it to dpaste.org using %pastebin, or view the whole thing syntax-highlighted with a single %pycat.
Traceback improvements
Previously, error tracebacks for errors happening in code cells were showing a hash, the one used for compiling the Python AST:
In [1]: def foo(): ...: return 3 / 0 ...: In [2]: foo() --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ZeroDivisionError Traceback (most recent call last) <ipython-input-2-c19b6d9633cf> in <module> ----> 1 foo() <ipython-input-1-1595a74c32d5> in foo() 1 def foo(): ----> 2 return 3 / 0 3 ZeroDivisionError: division by zero
The error traceback is now correctly formatted, showing the cell number in which the error happened:
In [1]: def foo(): ...: return 3 / 0 ...: Input In [2]: foo() --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ZeroDivisionError Traceback (most recent call last) input In [2], in <module> ----> 1 foo() Input In [1], in foo() 1 def foo(): ----> 2 return 3 / 0 ZeroDivisionError: division by zero
Miscellaneous
- ~ is now expanded when part of a path in most magics :ghpull:`13385`
- %/%%timeit magic now adds comma every thousands to make reading long number easier :ghpull:`13379`
- "info" messages can now be customised to hide some fields :ghpull:`13343`
- collections.UserList now pretty-prints :ghpull:`13320`
- The debugger now have a persistent history, which should make it less annoying to retype commands :ghpull:`13246`
- !pip !conda !cd or !ls are likely doing the wrong thing, we now warn users if they use it. :ghpull:`12954`
- make %precision work for numpy.float64 type :ghpull:`12902`
Numfocus Small Developer Grant
To prepare for Python 3.10 we have also started working on removing reliance and any dependency that is not Python 3.10 compatible; that include migrating our test suite to pytest, and starting to remove nose. This also mean that the iptest command is now gone, and all testing is via pytest.
This was in bog part thanks the NumFOCUS Small Developer grant, we were able to allocate 4000 to hire Nikita Kniazev (@Kojoley) who did a fantastic job at updating our code base, migrating to pytest, pushing our coverage, and fixing a large number of bugs. I highly recommend contacting them if you need help with C++ and Python projects
You can find all relevant issues and PRs with the SDG 2021 tag https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues?q=label%3A%22Numfocus+SDG+2021%22+
Removing support for Older Python
We are also removing support for Python up to 3.7 allowing internal code to use more efficient pathlib, and make better use of type annotations.
We have about 34 PRs only to update some logic tu update some function from managing strings to using Pathlib.
The completer has also seen significant updates and make use of newer Jedi API offering faster and more reliable tab completion.