Tab completion inside Jupyter QtConsole ipdb shell

[DevinBayly]

Hi there,

I have just discovered that the tab completion utility seems to be offline when using tracing with ipdb but only with qtconsole of the jupyter variety. By which I mean that the ipython qtconsole still has functioning tab completion during an ipdb trace so I am curious if anyone knows how to enable this, or if this needs to become something to eventually work into a later version.

Cheers,
Devin

[takluyver]

I think you're mistaken about ipython qtconsole. The Qt console has never had tab completion inside the debugger, and there's no easy way to do it. See ipython/ipython#902.

[DevinBayly]

ok, I'll transfer my comment to the jupyter console issue page then?

[takluyver]

I'm not quite sure what you mean.

This is an issue for all Jupyter frontends, because our messaging protocol does not know about debugging specifically. The Python debugger is just calling input() to prompt the user for the next command, and that gets passed on to the frontends as a generic 'prompt for a line of input' message. There's no completion machinery associated with that.

We have vaguely talked about adding some specialised debugging messages to the protocol, which would allow building a nicer debugger interface in Jupyter frontends. But it would be quite a lot of work, and it's not very high priority.

[wmvanvliet]

Closing this, as it is a well known issue that first needs to be addressed in the ipython kernel itself.