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You have to "easy_install readline" into your virtualenv along with "pip install ipython" to get ipython's control characters working (otherwise ipython outputs what looks like garbled text). readline is easy_install'd rather than pip'd to because easy_install'd libs end up at the head of sys.path.

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i thought you only needed to do that on a mac, on linux it seems to work fine with pip install ipython

Yes, that's right. On Linux, you already have readline installed. But neither Macs nor IPython can ship with readline itself, because of the GPL, so by default you get the inferior libedit.

The Qt console doesn't require readline, but it does require Qt (and zeromq, and pygments).

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