Stumbled yet again¹ on mentions of IPython and decided to look into it, prev. assumption being that it’s the same or almost the same thing as Jupyter Notebook. (Also the i in ipdb stands for IPython-enabled, apparently).

It’s not., it’s a separate interactive superset of the Python cli that’s runnable by itself through python3 -m IPython.

Which in turn feels like a better / more interactive shell that can also do magic commands (%xxx) that I’ve seen in Google Colab / Jupyter; additionally understands bash stuff as-is and does other cool stuff. Definitely worth looking into.

ALSO the same article¹ mentions a way of using IPython inside ipdb, quoting:

ipdb> from IPython import embed
ipdb> embed() # drop into an IPython session.
        # Any variables you define or modify here
        # will not affect program execution

To run a program with ipdb without editing the source and dropping in an ipdb prompt when if it breaks from shell:

python3 -m ipdb script.py

Took another look at the official docu 26.2. pdb — The Python Debugger — Python 2.7.18 documentation:

• p prints the expression following, pp pretty-prints it.