Important

This documentation covers IPython versions 6.0 and higher. Beginning with version 6.0, IPython stopped supporting compatibility with Python versions lower than 3.3 including all versions of Python 2.7.

If you are looking for an IPython version compatible with Python 2.7, please use the IPython 5.x LTS release and refer to its documentation (LTS is the long term support release).

9.x Series

IPython 9.0

Welcome to IPython 9.0. As with any version of IPython before this release, it should not be majorly different from the previous version, at least on the surface. We still hope you can upgrade as soon as possible amd look forward to your feedback.

I take the opportunity of this new release to remind you that IPython is governed by the Jupyter code of conduct. And that even beyond so we strive to be an inclusive, accepting and progressive community, Here is a relevant extract from the COC.

We strive to be a community that welcomes and supports people of all backgrounds and identities. This includes, but is not limited to, members of any race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, color, immigration status, social and economic class, educational level, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, physical appearance, family status, technological or professional choices, academic discipline, religion, mental ability, and physical ability.

As a short overview of the changes in 9.0, we have over 100 PRs merged since 8.x, many of which are refactors, cleanups and simplifications.

  • (optional) LLM integration in the CLI.

  • Complete rewrite of color and theme handling, which now supports more colors and symbols.

  • Move tests out of tree in the wheel with a massive reduction in file size.

  • Tips at startup

  • Removal of (almost) all deprecated functionalities and options.

  • Stricter and more stable codebase.

Removal and deprecation

I am not going to list the removals and deprecations, but anything deprecated since before IPython 8.16 is gone, including many shim modules and indirect imports that would just re-expose IPykernel, qtconsole, etc.

A number of new deprecations have been added (run your test suites with -Werror), as those will be removed in the future.

Color and theme rewrite

IPython’s color handling had grown many options through the years, and it was quite entrenched in the codebase, directly emitting ansi escape sequences deep in traceback printing and other places.

This made developing new color schemes difficult, and limited us to the 16 colors of the original ansi standard defined by your terminal.

Syntax highlighting was also inconsistent, and not all syntax elements were always using the same theme.

Using (style, token) pairs

Starting with 9.0, the color and theme handling has been rewritten, and internally all the printing is done by yielding pairs of Style and token objects (compatible with pygments and prompt_toolkit), then as much as possible, IPython formats these objects at the last moment, using the current theme.

256-bit colors and unicode symbols

This means that new themes can now use all of pygments’s color names and functionalities, and you can define for each token style, the foreground, background, underline, bold, italic and likely a few other options.

In addition, themes now provide a number of symbols, that can be used when rendering traceback or debugger prompts. This let you customize the appearance a bit more. For example, instead of using dash and greater-than sign, The arrow pointing the current frame can actually use horizontal line and right arrow unicode symbol, for a more refined experience.

New themes using colors and symbols

All the existing themes (Linux, LightBG, Neutral and NoColor) should not see any changes, but I added two new pride themes, that show the use of 256bits colors and unicode symbols. I’m not a designer, so feel free to suggest updates and new themes to add.

Themes currently still require writing a bit of Python, but I hope to get contributions for IPython to be able to load them from text files, for easier redistribution.

Tips at startup

IPython now displays a few tips at startup (1 line), to help you discover new features. All those are in the codebase, and can be displayed randomly or based on date. You can disable it via a configuration option or the --no-tips flag.

Please contribute more tips by sending pull requests!

Out-of-tree tests

And more generally I have changed the folder structure and what is packaged in the wheel to reduce the file size. The wheel is down from 825kb to 590kb (-235kb) which is about a 28% reduction. This should help when you run IPython via Pyodide – when your browser needs to download it.

According to https://pypistats.org/packages/ipython, IPython is downloaded about 13 million times per week, so this should reduce PyPI bandwidth by about 2Tb each week, which is small compared to the total download, but still, trying to reduce resource usage is a worthy goal.

Integration with Jupyter-AI LLM

This feature allow IPython CLI to make use of Jupyter-AI provider to use LLM for suggestion, and completing the current text. Unlike many features of IPython this is disabled by default, and need several configuration options to be set to work:

  • Choose a provider in jupyter-ai and set it as default one: c.TerminalInteractiveShell.llm_provider_class = <fully qualified path> You likely need to setup your provider with API key or other things.

  • Choose and available shortcut (I’ll take Ctrl-Q as an example) and bind to trigger llm_autosuggestion only while typing.

c.TerminalInteractiveShell.shortcuts = [
     {
         "new_keys": ["c-q"],
         "command": "IPython:auto_suggest.llm_autosuggestion",
         "new_filter": "navigable_suggestions & default_buffer_focused",
         "create": True,
     },
 ]

See LLM Suggestions for more.

Thanks as well to the D. E. Shaw group for sponsoring this work.

For something completely different

Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933-2020 was an American lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg spent much of her legal career as an advocate for gender equality, women’s rights, abortion rights, and religious freedom.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who helped with the 9.0 release and working toward 9.0.

As usual you can find the full list of PRs on GitHub under the 9.0 milestone.