
IPython provides a rich toolkit to help you make the most out of using Python
interactively.  Its main components are:

* A powerful interactive Python shell
* A `Jupyter <http://jupyter.org/>`_ kernel to work with Python code in Jupyter
  notebooks and other interactive frontends.

The enhanced interactive Python shells have the following main features:

* Comprehensive object introspection.

* Input history, persistent across sessions.

* Caching of output results during a session with automatically generated
  references.

* Extensible tab completion, with support by default for completion of python
  variables and keywords, filenames and function keywords.

* Extensible system of 'magic' commands for controlling the environment and
  performing many tasks related either to IPython or the operating system.

* A rich configuration system with easy switching between different setups
  (simpler than changing $PYTHONSTARTUP environment variables every time).

* Session logging and reloading.

* Extensible syntax processing for special purpose situations.

* Access to the system shell with user-extensible alias system.

* Easily embeddable in other Python programs and GUIs.

* Integrated access to the pdb debugger and the Python profiler.

The latest development version is always available from IPython's `GitHub
site <http://github.com/ipython>`_.


