A few things that work best/only at the IPython terminal or Qt console clients¶
Running code with %run¶
%%writefile script.py
x = 10
y = 20
z = x+y
print 'z is:', z
%run script
x
Event loop and GUI integration¶
The %gui magic enables the integration of GUI event loops with the interactive execution loop, allowing you to run GUI code without blocking IPython.
Consider for example the execution of Qt-based code. Once we enable the Qt gui support:
%gui qt
We can define a simple Qt application class (simplified version from this Qt tutorial):
import sys
from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore
class SimpleWindow(QtGui.QWidget):
def __init__(self, parent=None):
QtGui.QWidget.__init__(self, parent)
self.setGeometry(300, 300, 200, 80)
self.setWindowTitle('Hello World')
quit = QtGui.QPushButton('Close', self)
quit.setGeometry(10, 10, 60, 35)
self.connect(quit, QtCore.SIGNAL('clicked()'),
self, QtCore.SLOT('close()'))
And now we can instantiate it:
app = QtCore.QCoreApplication.instance()
if app is None:
app = QtGui.QApplication([])
sw = SimpleWindow()
sw.show()
from IPython.lib.guisupport import start_event_loop_qt4
start_event_loop_qt4(app)
But IPython still remains responsive:
10+2
The %gui magic can be similarly used to control Wx, Tk, glut and pyglet applications, as can be seen in our examples.
Embedding IPython in a terminal application¶
%%writefile simple-embed.py
# This shows how to use the new top-level embed function. It is a simpler
# API that manages the creation of the embedded shell.
from IPython import embed
a = 10
b = 20
embed(header='First time', banner1='')
c = 30
d = 40
embed(header='The second time')
The example in kernel-embedding shows how to embed a full kernel into an application and how to connect to this kernel from an external process.
Logging terminal sessions and transitioning to a notebook¶
The %logstart magic lets you log a terminal session with various degrees of control, and the %notebook one will convert an interactive console session into a notebook with all input cells already created for you (but no output).