IPython provides a rich toolkit to help you make the most out of using Python interactively. Its main components are:

A powerful interactive Python shell
A Jupyter <https://jupyter.org/>_ kernel to work with Python code in Jupyter notebooks and other interactive frontends.

The enhanced interactive Python shells have the following main features:

Comprehensive object introspection.
Input history, persistent across sessions.
Caching of output results during a session with automatically generated references.
Extensible tab completion, with support by default for completion of python variables and keywords, filenames and function keywords.
Extensible system of 'magic' commands for controlling the environment and performing many tasks related either to IPython or the operating system.
A rich configuration system with easy switching between different setups (simpler than changing $PYTHONSTARTUP environment variables every time).
Session logging and reloading.
Extensible syntax processing for special purpose situations.
Access to the system shell with user-extensible alias system.
Easily embeddable in other Python programs and GUIs.
Integrated access to the pdb debugger and the Python profiler.

The latest development version is always available from IPython's GitHub site <http://github.com/ipython>_.