Specific config details
Terminal Colors
The default IPython configuration has most bells and whistles turned on (they're pretty safe). But there's one that may cause problems on some systems: the use of color on screen for displaying information. This is very useful, since IPython can show prompts and exception tracebacks with various colors, display syntax-highlighted source code, and in general make it easier to visually parse information.
The following terminals seem to handle the color sequences fine:
- Linux main text console, KDE Konsole, Gnome Terminal, E-term, rxvt, xterm.
- CDE terminal (tested under Solaris). This one boldfaces light colors.
- (X)Emacs buffers. See the :ref:`emacs` section for more details on using IPython with (X)Emacs.
- A Windows (XP/2k) command prompt with pyreadline.
- A Windows (XP/2k) CygWin shell. Although some users have reported problems; it is not clear whether there is an issue for everyone or only under specific configurations. If you have full color support under cygwin, please post to the IPython mailing list so this issue can be resolved for all users.
These have shown problems:
- Windows command prompt in WinXP/2k logged into a Linux machine via telnet or ssh.
- Windows native command prompt in WinXP/2k, without Gary Bishop's extensions. Once Gary's readline library is installed, the normal WinXP/2k command prompt works perfectly.
IPython uses colors for two main groups of things: prompts and tracebacks which are directly printed to the terminal, and the object introspection system which passes large sets of data through a pager.
Colors in the pager
On some systems, the default pager has problems with ANSI colour codes. To configure your default pager to allow these:
- Set the environment PAGER variable to less.
- 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.
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 provides powerful IPython integration for vim.
(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:
(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:
(require 'python) (setq python-shell-interpreter "ipython")