How do I "pretty-print" something in the Sagemath command line (as in sympy)? The only solution I found was to use get_test_shell() function, according to this entry in the docs. But basically I have to use
from sage.repl.interpreter import get_test_shell
shell = get_test_shell()
shell.run_cell('%display ascii_art')
shell.run_cell('integral(x^2/pi^x, x)')
I find this to be too cumbersome (4 complicated lines just to display things nicely!) and what you want to display even has to be given as a string. So I'm looking for an easier alternative. I'm sure there's another way; I just can't find it.
I think I might be using the wrong terms because according to the manual itself:
Pretty printing means rendering things so that MathJax or some other latex-aware front end can render real math.
So if I use pretty_print_default(True) it's going to always print latex, which isn't what I want for now.
One thing I tried that I thought would work was to do
from sympy import pretty_print
Which should use Sympy's pretty-print (which is what I actually want), but it doesn't make any difference.
You ran across the problem that we want to be able to doctest things that are interactive by their nature. Try just this at the command line:
sage: %display ascii_art
sage: integral(x^2/pi^x, x)
/ 2 2 \ -x*log(pi)
-\x *log (pi) + 2*x*log(pi) + 2/*e
---------------------------------------------
3
log (pi)
This is one of the "magic" percent directives in IPython. I agree it could be documented better.