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Comment by ktpsns | Hacker News Reader

I could not agree more to this article. Not only am I a happy IPython and zsh user, but also like searchable menus (also refered to as "OSD search" or similar in non-Mac OS X contexts).

My feeling is that we experience a revival of keyboard-based searchable/explorable GUIs due to two reasons:

(1.) Many people use notebooks where both hands rest on the keyboard (in contrast to an external mouse where one hand permanently rests).

(2.) Desktop searches, or virtually any kind of search with a fast index took over (clearly pioneered by Apples Spotlight). That's the Google spirit of searching for things instead of clicking menus.

This is probably one of the changes where in the retrospective we can say "the 2010s" brought us. :-)

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IPython dev here,

Thanks to you (and the author) for being happy users of IPython; but if you don't have complaints you are not using it enough :-) We do our best to provide good completion; but most of the work is thanks to Jedi (Dave Halter) for the completion and prompt_toolkit (Jonathan Slenders) for the UI , at least in terminal.

There is a lot of improvement that could be done to completion (time and funding missing), and we are always looking for Feedback and Pull Requests.

Side Note while I agree about the statement about Julia and bar(foo) vs foo.bar(); nothing prevent the completer to add text not at the cursor position. Having foo)<tab> suggesting to prepend `bar(` is a possibility.

(also hijacking top comment...)

One of the most jarring problems with ipython is scoping of list comprehensions. I loose access to certain objects while writing more elaborate list comps all the time. I'd be really happy if that got fixed at some point...

> if you don't have complaints you are not using it enough

I'm a daily user. I wish there were a way to enable the autocomplete and doc display that ptipython has. In both the terminal and jupyter it would be very helpful.

Thanks for the feedback,

In JupyterLab you can open the "Inspector" that should have the equivalent and show the doc for the current token under cursor.

I'd love to have time to implement that for IPython, or even have for the completer the documentation that pops up for the current highlighted option of the completer.

As IPython is now based on Prompt toolkit there is no reason not to have that; it's mostly a question of finding the time to implement it !

Helm makes Emacs so much more discoverable . It saves me an enormous amount of time by giving me discovery of feature and for the most part approaching DWIM.

https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

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