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bpython - A fancy curses interface to the Python interactive interpreter
========================================================================

Dependencies
============

* Pygments
* requests
* curtsies >= 0.1.18,<0.2.0
* greenlet
* Sphinx != 1.1.2 (optional, for the documentation)
* mock (optional, for the testsuite)
* babel (optional, for internationalization)
* watchdog (optional, for monitoring imported modules for changes)
* jedi (optional, for experimental multiline completion)

If you are using Python 2 before 2.7.7, the following dependency is also
required:

* requests[security]

If you have problems installing cffi which is needed by pyOpenSSL,
please take a look at https://cffi.readthedocs.org/en/release-0.8/#macos-x.


bpython-urwid
-------------
``bpython-urwid`` requires the following additional packages:

* urwid

Introduction
============
A few people asked for stuff like syntax highlighting and autocomplete for the
Python interactive interpreter.  IPython seems to offer this (plus you can get
readline behaviour in the vanilla interpreter) but I tried IPython a couple of
times. Perhaps I didn't really get it, but I get the feeling that the ideas
behind IPython are pretty different to bpython. I didn't want to create a whole
development environment; I simply wanted to provide a couple of neat features
that already exist and turn them into something a little more interactive.

The idea is to provide the user with all the features in-line, much like modern
IDEs, but in a simple, lightweight package that can be run in a terminal
window, so curses seemed like the best choice.  Sorry if you use Windows.

bpython doesn't attempt to create anything new or groundbreaking, it simply
brings together a few neat ideas and focuses on practicality and usefulness.
For this reason, the "Rewind" function should be taken with a pinch of salt,
but personally I have found it to be very useful. I use bpython now whenever I
would normally use the vanilla interpreter, e.g. for testing out solutions to
people's problems on IRC, quickly testing a method of doing something without
creating a temporary file, etc..

I hope you find it useful and please feel free to submit any bugs/patches (yeah
right)/suggestions to:
robertanthonyfarrell@gmail.com
or place them at the github issue page for this project at:
http://github.com/bpython/bpython/issues/

For any other ways of communicating with bpython users and devs you can find us
at the community page on the projects homepage:
http://bpython-interpreter.org/community

Or in the documentation at http://docs.bpython-interpreter.org/community.html.

Hope to see you there!

Features
========

* In-line syntax highlighting.
	This uses Pygments for lexing the code as you type, and colours
	appropriately. Pygments does a great job of doing all of the tricky stuff
	and really leaving me with very little to do except format the tokens in
	all my favourite colours.

* Readline-like autocomplete with suggestions displayed as you type.
	Thanks to Python's readline interface to libreadline and a ready-made class
	for using a Python interpreter's scope as the dataset, the only work here
	was displaying the readline matches as you type in a separate curses window
	below/above the cursor.

* Expected parameter list.
	As in a lot of modern IDEs, bpython will attempt to display a list of
	parameters for any function you call. The inspect module is tried first,
	which works with any Python function, and then pydoc if that fails, which
	seems to be pretty adequate, but obviously in some cases it's simply not
	possible. I used pyparsing to cure my nested parentheses woes; again, it
	was nice and easy.

* Rewind.
	I didn't call this "Undo" because I thought that would be misleading, but
	"Rewind" is probably as bad. The idea is that the code entered is kept in
	memory and when the Rewind function is called, the last line is popped and
	the entire code is re-evaluated. As you can imagine, this has a lot of
	potential problems, but for defining classes and functions, I've found it
	to be nothing but useful.

* Pastebin code/write to file.
	I don't really use the save thing much, but the pastebin thing's great. Hit
	a key and what you see on the screen will be sent to a pastebin and a URL
	is returned for you to do what you like with. I've hardcoded
	paste.pocoo.org in for now, that needs to be fixed so it's configurable.
	Next release, I promise.

* Flush curses screen to stdout.
	A featurette, perhaps, but I thought it was worth noting.  I can't
	personally recall a curses app that does this, perhaps it's often not
	useful, but when you quit bpython, the screen data will be flushed to
	stdout, so it basically looks the same as if you had quit the vanilla
	interpreter.

Configuration
=============
See the sample-config file for a list of available options.  You should save
your config file as ~/.config/bpython/config (i.e
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bpython/config) or specify at the command line::

	bpython --config /path/to/bpython/config

Known Bugs
==========
For known bugs please see bpython's issue tracker at github:

http://github.com/bpython/bpython/issues/

CLI Windows Support
===================

Dependencies
------------
Curses
    Use the appropriate version compiled by Christoph Gohlke
    http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

pyreadline
    Use the version in the cheeseshop
    http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyreadline/

Recommended
-----------
Obtain the less program from GnuUtils. This makes the pager work as intended.
It can be obtained from cygwin or GnuWin32 or msys

Current version is tested with
------------------------------
 * Curses 2.2
 * pyreadline 1.7

Curses Notes
------------
The curses used has a bug where the colours are displayed incorrectly:
 * red  is swapped with blue
 * cyan is swapped with yellow

To correct this I have provided my windows.theme file.

This curses implementation has 16 colors (dark and light versions of the
colours)

See also
========

Documentation
    http://docs.bpython-interpreter.org/

Developer documentation
    http://docs.bpython-interpreter.org/contributing.html
