[IPython-dev] Re: Question about IPython behaviour

[Fernando Perez]

Robert Kern wrote:
> Fernando Perez wrote:
> 
> 
>>While not ideal, I think that's not terrible for a simple line-oriented 
>>system which doesn't really offer any serious multiline editing.  But 
>>now that we are migrating to a GUI, we should most certainly offer a way 
>>to have blank lines.
> 
> 
> We should take a look at the design of pyrepl_. It has real multi-line 
> editing and probably a design more suited to our endeavors here. We 
> should stea^H^H^H^Hbe inspired by how it solves these problems.
> 
> .. _pyrepl: http://codespeak.net/pyrepl/

I talked to M. Hudson (pyrepl's author) ages ago about this: pyrepl wasn't 
suitable for ipython because it's curses-based.  That's how they get 
multi-line capabilities.  It is certainly a possibility to build a 
curses-enabled version of ipython which could run on top of pyrepl.

But I think the decision to keep ipython line-oriented was a good one: curses 
is *nix only, so had I gone with pyrepl early on, we would have lost all the 
win32 users.  And I know that many people in the win32 world do make heavy use 
of ipython, so I don't want to break things for them.

An _optional_ pyrepl-enhanced ipython would be great, and we certainly can 
look into how they tackle a number of issues.  I just wanted to fill you in a 
bit on the history behind ipython/pyrepl.

Cheers,

f