%colors magic has no effect in qtconsole 4.0.0

[lebedov]

I have qtconsole 4.0.0 installed via pip in a conda environment with Python 2.7.10 and PyQT 4.11.3. When I try to specify a color at the command line explicitly, e.g., jupyter qtconsole --colors=linux, the console starts but I observe the following warning:

[JupyterQtConsoleApp] WARNING | Unrecognized alias: '--colors=Linux', it will probably have no effect.

The specified colors do not take effect. Attempting to set the color via the %colors magic within the running console also has no effect.

Relevant installed packages:

$ yolk -l | egrep 'ipython|qtconsole|jupyter|ipykernel'
ipykernel       - 4.0.3        - active 
ipython-genutils - 0.1.0        - active 
ipython         - 4.0.0        - active 
jupyter-client  - 4.0.0        - active 
jupyter-console - 4.0.0        - active 
jupyter-core    - 4.0.2        - active 
jupyter         - 1.0.0        - active 
qtconsole       - 4.0.0        - active 

[lebedov]

As per this remark, the --colors option is no longer supported (although the --style option is still available). The problem with the %colors magic still exists, though.

[takluyver]

I think it does actually do something - do %colors nocolor, for instance, and then look at some help information (e.g. %colors?).

It doesn't affect the Qt console prompts, because those are rendered by the frontend, and it doesn't affect subprocesses like ls, because they choose their own colours.

[lebedov]

I see - I was looking for the functionality now associated with the --style option.