The programming style imposed by PyQt (and other GUI toolkit wrappers) is to create an application instance with some widgets and to enter into an event loop that locks you from the Python command line interpreter.
Module iqt enables you to:
Module iqt works by hooking qApp->processEvents() on the event hook of the readline module. The GNU readline library closes the event loop by calling qApp->processEvent() at a maximum rate of 10 times per second while reading your keyboard input.
To see how iqt works, play with ICompass.py by running
python -i ICompass.py
python ICompass.py
ipython ICompass.py
My .pythonrc.py:
# Set your PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable to $HOME/.pythonrc.py # # inspired by: # http://opag.ca/wiki/OpagSnippets?action=highlight&value=pythonrc from atexit import register from os import path import readline import rlcompleter # Sets up a tab for completion (use a single space to indent Python code). readline.parse_and_bind('tab: complete') historyPath = path.expanduser(' /.python_history') readline.set_history_length(1000) # Reads the history of the previous session, if it exists. if path.exists(historyPath): readline.read_history_file(historyPath) # Sets up history saving on exit. def save_history(historyPath=historyPath): import readline # why fails the next line to see the global readline? readline.write_history_file(historyPath) register(save_history) # Cleans up the global name space. del register, path, readline, rlcompleter, historyPath, save_history # Tries to make the PyQt and PyQwt widgets usable from the command line. try: import iqt del iqt except ImportError: pass # Tries to import SciPy, PyQt and Qwt. try: from scipy import * from qt import * from qwt import * except ImportError: pass # Sets up the SciPy help for tab completion: help(scipy.optimize.leastsq). try: import scipy except ImportError: pass # Local Variables: *** # mode: python *** # End: ***