[SciPy-User] Pylab - standard packages

[Travis Oliphant]

On Sep 21, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 3:39 PM,  <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Stata and matlab have a much nicer interaction of shell and editor,
>> and data viewer, and ...
>> and they work after clicking a few install buttons (and paying first of course).
>> 
>> Obviously I'm in a minority, I like Windows (TM), GUIs, spyder, git
>> gui and use ipython only in emergencies.
> 
> But within spyder, you still surely use a python shell of some sort,
> yes? And isn't ipython a superior option to the regular python repl
> for these purposes?

It would be but it sometimes isn't configured very well with the GUI so that plotting doesn't work as well as you would hope.   The Spyder normal command line (as well as IEP command line) does provide some of the nice features of IPython at a "standard-looking" prompt.

IPython, the command line should be part of the standard in my opinion, but not necessarily IPython-the-notebook as that is just one of many ways to interact with the standard.

I also really like the idea of a pylab default workspace where one has done

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import scipy as sp

But, already in IPython the %pylab command (or ipython --pylab) creates a workspace where at least numpy names and matplotlib plotting names are available --- this should be resolved so that either there are two approaches clearly labeled or just one.

-Travis

> 
> (Personally I just use ipython at the terminal, and I've really only
> trained my fingers to always start ipython instead of python in the
> last few months.)
> 
> -n
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