IPython

IPython is an interactive computing environment for Python that provides a terminal shell and the kernel used by Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab. It addresses the need for an interactive session where code can be run incrementally, inspected, profiled, and debugged, with command history retained across sessions. It also includes tools for parallel and distributed computing.

Its main components include Terminal IPython, the IPython Kernel, the Traitlets configuration system, and a display system that renders HTML, Markdown, LaTeX, images, plots, and tables. Features include Jedi-powered tab completion, magic commands such as %timeit, %debug, %run, %prun, and %matplotlib, object introspection via ? and ??, persistent SQLite-backed history, and shell integration through ! and %cd. It supports remote code execution and custom kernels for other languages.

IPython is aimed at developers, data scientists, educators, and system administrators working in Python. It is released under the BSD 3-Clause License, permitting free use in commercial and non-commercial projects, and is maintained under Project Jupyter's community governance model.