IPython is great. Also, if you do any django work, you'll probably love shell_plus, which is an enhanced shell that uses IPython and automatically imports all the models of your installed_apps. shell_plus is a command extensions provided by django-extensions:<p><a href="https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions</a>
The overview is here, which I found more helpful: <a href="http://ipython.github.com/ipython-doc/dev/overview.html" rel="nofollow">http://ipython.github.com/ipython-doc/dev/overview.html</a>
IPython has some really handy features for quick development, like adding ? after any object to get its docstring, and opening any line in the history in a text editor.<p>I also found it useful to add a newline after the prompt so you can copy/paste snippets without getting the indentation wrong.