← Back to context

Comment by anthk

19 hours ago

That's Emacs for you. No, seriously. Have a look to eshell and elisp.

I'm trying to get away from Emacs.

I've built a standalone PoC REPL with an inferior process as a uni student (2010), it was ca 200 lines of Python and Tk. Stuff you get for free: text selection, copy/paste, multiline editing, proportional fonts, etc. It's not a hard problem, but there seems to be little collective interest to push such efforts forward.

The best idea I've seen so far is Swift Playgrounds. You get a text editor, start writing a script, run it at your own convenience, standard stuff. The good stuff is, it takes a snapshot of the running process at every line, and allows you to travel back in time, inspect the state in a debugger, and rerun from any single point. When you hit run, it restarts from the first new line, so you never pay the upfront cost of a prior heavy computation.

You get every benefit of a REPL, plus every benefit of a simple IDE, plus a time travelling debugger, plus vertical integration.

If only it wasn't just Swift.