I Built a Python REPL into my Terminal

Growing up, I thought my neighbor was silly. He was always working on his house. Once he redid all of the plumbing. The pipes weren’t leaking. They weren’t made of lead. They were just a bit noisy and that bothered him. I thought that fixing such a small problem was a big waste of time and money. But these days I understand how he must’ve felt.

I don’t live in a house. I live in a terminal. And when I write Python, sometimes I check things in the REPL. The Python built-in REPL works fine, but it’s not as nice as it could be. So I built a better one into Snail.

It has autocomplete.

And object expansion.

And syntax highlighting.

And inline charts.

I also ripped it out of Snail and put it on the web for you to try here.

I love it when I can fix the things that bother me.