I use IPython quite often in everyday work. So it would be handy if IPython could import some libraries automatically.

For scientific computing, perhaps the most popular option for IPython is --pylab which imports numpy and matplotlib automatically. Check the below example.

Another way to import libraries when starting IPython is to create a startup file for python. I created a python file called .startup.py which contains the below codes in it.

print("load ~/.startup.py")
print("import sys, collections, functools, itertools, heapq, pprint, bisect, operator, math")
import sys, collections, functools, itertools, heapq, pprint, bisect, operator, math
pp = pprint.pprint

Also I set the enviornment variable PYTHONSTARTUP through puting the below line in .bashrc file.

export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.startup.py

Enjoy your IPython.