DreamPie with virtualenv

If you haven’t heard about it, DreamPie is an awesome GUI application layered on top of standard Python shell. I use it for elaborate prototyping where its multi-line input box is a significant advance over raw, terminal UX of IPython.

However, up until recently I didn’t know how to make DreamPie cooperate with virtualenv. Because it’s a GUI program, I scoured its menu and all the preference windows, searching for any trace of option that would allow me to set the Python executable. Having failed, I was convinced that authors didn’t think about including it – which was rather surprising, though.

But hey, DreamPie is open source! So I went to look around its code to see whether I can easily enhance it with an ability to specify Python binary. It wasn’t too long before I stumbled into this vital fragment:

The conclusions we could draw from this anecdote are thereby as follows:

• It is indeed true that source code is often the best documentation…
• …especially for open source programs where actual docs often suck.

With this newfound knowledge about dreampie arguments, it wasn’t very hard to make it use current virtualenv:

And after doing some more research, I ended up adding the following line to my ~/.bash_aliases:

Now I can simply type dp to get a DreamPie instance operating within current virtualenv but independent from terminal session. Very useful!