ipython-terminal.md

Python in a terminal (IPython)

You can complete the tutorial above in a terminal as well, using the ipython command line interface. To get started type the following in a terminal window

ipython --pylab

This starts ipython with some common libraries autoloaded, including:

import numpy as np		# basic numerical analysis
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt	# plotting

The --pylab flag should set things up so that plots will just automatically open when you make them, but if that doesn't happen, try adding pylab.ion() and plt.show() to your codes.

This is conveninent if you need to do some interactive work in a terminal, but it does remove some of the interactive features of spyder. You can recover some of the functionality using the following functions

a = np.arange(20)
print type(a)  # prints the data type of a
print dir(a)  # prints all the variables and functions inside of object a
print a.shape  # prints the dimension of a (rows, columns), only works on numpy arrays

In addition you can use a number of ipython specific commands to emulate of the features of spyder including

%hist  # prints history
np.arange?  # prints doc string of function/object
plt.plot??  # prints source of function/object

You can also use regular linux commands by prepending ! to the beginning. For example

!ls
!cd ~/

For more details type %quickref in an ipython terminal