I usually avoid tool upgrades - because nothing ever works like you want it to, and the upgrade to tool X save 10seconds per task A, ends up costing an entire day of configuration. But it finally seemed time to switch from the default python interactive shell to something else. The two alternatives are IPython and Bpython. Both of which support a bunch of rather advanced features - and neither of which support some very obvious things. a) Lack of CodeBlock history recall One of these very obvious things (and among the more pressing reasons to switch from the default Pyton Interactive Shell) is code block rather than line wise recall - Javascript consoles do this, the default Julia interactive console does this, It's a very obvious and needed feature and one that's very noticeably lacking (and I'm sure I'm not the only one). b) Autocomplete has very unusable completion options For one, I don't think most people need to see the command arguments and __doc__ for the *print* it or *abs* functions while they are typing them - but setting 'auto_display_list': False, will still do single tab completion - which more properly should only display the list on tab and complete on double-tab if there is more than one possible option (i.e. the way fish shell tab-completion works). FUZZY, SUBSTRING, completion produce completely unusable results, there is no frequency based history completion. c) various minor complaints -The key-combo to exit b-python doesn't work if the line is not empty - (in regular python interactive shell, the first keyboard interrupt will wipe the current line, the second one will exit) - and there doesn't seem to be a regular interrupt (wiping the line is not the same, if you want to cancel a whole block of input). -Ctrl arrows no longer move one word left or right. -History is shared - this might be nice, maybe 20% of the time, but if you are working on two completely different things in different sessions it's very awkward to have one session's history show up in another. -Sparse documentation
I don't mean this to sound like a rant or anything of the sort, I really want to like BPython, I like it's simplicity better than IPython, and over-time if I keep using Bpython I would probably work on some of these things. At any-rate I didn't want to start a bunch of separate threads for what might be very possibly my own subjective criticisms. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "bpython" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/bpython. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
