Interactive Limitations

As of version 1.4, show has good support for IPython, either running in a terminal window or in a Jupyter Notebook.

It’s support for the plain interactive Python REPL is much weaker. Call it experimental. It works well at the interactive prompt, and within imported modules. It cannot, however, be used within functions and classes defined within the interactive session. This is a result of how Python supports–or rather, fails to support–introspection for interactively-defined code. Whether this is a hard limit, or something that can be worked around over time, remains to be seen. (See e.g. this discussion).

Python under Windows does not support readline the same way it is supported on Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X. Experimental support is provided for the use of pyreadline under Windows to correct this variance. This feature is yet untested. Works/doesn’t work reports welcome!

If you want to work interactively, strongly advise you do so uner IPython not the stock REPL. Even better, in Jupyter Notebook, which is an excellent work environment in a way that the stock REPL never will be.