[IPython-dev] (no subject)

[Thomas Kluyver]

Hi Sjoerd,

On 5 July 2014 18:54, Sjoerd de Vries <sjdv1982 at gmail.com> wrote:

> However, command-line tool clouds are today's reality, and Python tools
> (numpy, scipy, matplotlib) just live in another universe until they are
> wrapped as a command-line tool. I feel that IPython needs to provide a
> better Python <=> shell interface than it does now. In particular, I have
> the following problems with it:
>
> 1. Python variable expansion within shell commands does not work
> seamlessly, especially if the command-line tool expects a file or stream.
> 2. Awk one-liners are mostly broken when entered in IPython.
> 3. Alias magic is incompatible with shell execution. This means that "%ls"
> is not the same as "!ls" (very confusing).
> 4. Shell execution also captures stderr
>
> I don't like to give negative criticism, especially since I am fairly new
> to IPython. So I have coded into IPython a possible solution that solves my
> problems. Hopefully it will be useful to the community.
>

Thanks. This looks like some really interesting ideas, but I think most or
all of it should live as an extension outside core IPython. We try to
carefully keep the scope of IPython itself constrained, because it would be
very easy for it to expand in a thousand directions, and I don't think this
is a direction that the core team would use much, so consequently we
wouldn't maintain it very well. If there are some simple hooks or something
that IPython needs so you can extend it as you want, we can look at merging
that, but things like the %bless magic, converters and parsing shell style
pipelines should be in a separate project.

You might be interested to know that in older releases of IPython, there
was a sh profile which enabled various shell-like features:
http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/rel-0.10.2/html/interactive/shell.html . It
was broken in the big refactoring for 0.11, although by then several of the
extra features had been folded into IPython's default mode, but it was
never repaired, and eventually got deleted.

Best wishes,
Thomas
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