IPython's built-in notebook mode (ipython notebook) entirely changed how I use Python. It's like an interactive session you can go save, reproduce, and publish.

Yes, and a hundred times yes for teaching.

IPython is great, but that was the most unconvincing article I've ever read.

i've been a moderate fan of ipython; it's the ipython notebook that changed everything for me.

i can have everything inline: syntax-highlignted code, markdown, dynamic plots, and LaTeX equations.

(some examples: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/ipython/ipython/blob/mast...)

what's more, you can share you work as a static .ipynb document or dynamically via a server (rather than your localhost, which is the default).

The shell exec magic, especially when combined with notebook mode and pylab inline, can make some simple analyses of text data really dead simple. You can, for example, do something like:

    my_data = !find . | grep .log | xargs grep interesting_event | awk '{print $3}'
    map(float, my_data)
    hist(my_data, 12)

Which will dump out a nice pretty 12-bin histogram of whatever the numeric data in the third column of output, of messages containing interesting_event was. To get this sort of fancy, run `ipython notebook --pylab=inline` and enjoy!

EDIT: for context, I wind up using this all the time to tease out information from Riak logs, like how long Bitcask merges take, in aggregate, and for locating particular events in time and characterizing their frequency.

I don't get why is this on front page. IPython is awesome, enough said. If you are not using it, you are doing it wrong.

The IPython debugger ipdb also makes a great replacement for the builtin pdb.

I use IPython whenever possible. But I recently started looking at DreamPie (http://www.dreampie.org/) because I was getting tired of the interpreter line break mode. I'd like to write in a text-file mode and then run. I know I can do this with Vim already but maybe I am just too noob running Python from vim sometimes crash my program or accidentally enter some hell state I can't re-enter my file. I am giving DreamPie a try now.

I use IPython for the interactive python part of https://coderpad.io - being able to run a block of code and drop you into a REPL on an exception with full syntax coloring and context is killer.

How does ipy work with virtual envs? I've always admired the feature list, but my assumption is that it doesn't really run in a virtual env, would that be accurate?

it works fine with virtualenvs, on osx, you can do

    virtualenv env
    . ./env/bin/activate
    easy_install readline
    pip install ipython

on linux, you can avoid the readline install. i have no idea what the windows scene is, but at least for the past four or so years, i've never had a problem with virtualenvs and ipython.

On windows it's the same. Although I think I usually install ipython outside of virtualenvs, because I tend to always use it.

It prints a warning if you're running ipython inside a virtualenv that some features might not work but in that case, you can just install ipython itself inside the venv (I haven't yet found any problems caused by using ipython inside a venv). Using a python2 ipython inside a python3 venv might not be a good idea, but you probably knew that already :)

%paste is a nifty but simple trick that I find really useful

One of my colleagues hates IPython for no particular reason, he prefers using the standard python shell.