[IPython-dev] pyreadline

[Jörgen Stenarson]

Hi all,

I have been thinking about the future of pyreadline considering the work 
  on ipython1.

  * ANSI color escapes. In trunk ansi color escapes are used to handle 
color in prompts. This is convenient(for the programmer) when the 
terminal understands these escapes. But on windows this is not the case, 
I imagine a few of the guis proposed for ipython1 would also have 
trouble with them. In pyreadline we have code for parsing this. So it 
would probably make sense to have this functionality available for 
ipython1 as well. From a users point of view I think we should consider 
figuring out a way that is easier to understand and expand for the 
future. We could include ways to use boldface, italics, underline etc.

  * I know Gael is looking into using pyreadline for some gui interface 
this means there will be even more dependency of ipython on pyreadline. 
Perhaps this even means we should add pyreadline to ipython1.

  * Completions. Parts of the tab-completion code in ipython could 
probably be made to work in pyreadline directly making it useful at a 
normal pythonprompt as well.


There is a ton of work I would like to do in cleaning up the codebase 
and improving the test coverage. Going with nose here just as in ipython 
makes sense. Converting the documentation to rest format using sphinx 
looks like a good idea as well.

Jörgen