IPython Documentation

Release:

9.0.2

Date:

March 08, 2025

Welcome to the official IPython documentation.

IPython provides a rich toolkit to help you make the most of using Pythoninteractively. Its main components are:

• A powerful interactive Python shell.

  

• AJupyter kernel to work with Python code in Jupyternotebooks and other interactive frontends.

The enhanced interactive Python shells and kernel have the following mainfeatures:

• Comprehensive object introspection.

• Input history, persistent across sessions.

• Caching of output results during a session with automatically generatedreferences.

• Extensible tab completion, with support by default for completion of pythonvariables and keywords, filenames and function keywords.

• Extensible system of ‘magic’ commands for controlling the environment andperforming many tasks related to IPython or the operating system.

• A rich configuration system with easy switching between different setups(simpler than changing$PYTHONSTARTUP environment variables every time).

• Session logging and reloading.

• Extensible syntax processing for special purpose situations.

• Access to the system shell with user-extensible alias system.

• Easily embeddable in other Python programs and GUIs.

• Integrated access to the pdb debugger and the Python profiler.

The Command line interface inherits the above functionality and adds

• real multi-line editing thanks toprompt_toolkit.

• syntax highlighting as you type.

• integration with command line editor for a better workflow.

The kernel also has its share of features. When used with a compatible frontend,it allows:

• the object to create a rich display of Html, Images, Latex, Sound andVideo.

• interactive widgets with the use of theipywidgets package.

This documentation will walk you through most of the features of the IPythoncommand line and kernel, as well as describe the internal mechanisms in orderto improve your Python workflow.

You can find the table of content for this documentation in the leftsidebar, allowing you to come back to previous sections or skip ahead, if needed.

The latest development version is always available from IPython’sGitHubrepository.

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page