Commit 367b124

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2008 Bob Farrell

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bpython - A fancy curses interface to the Python interactive interpreter

=======

Dependencies

============

Pygments

pyparsing

(apt-get install python-pyparsing python-pygments)

Introduction

============

A few people asked for stuff like syntax highlighting

and autocomplete for the Python interactive interpreter.

IPython seems to offer this (plus you can get readline

behaviour in the vanilla interpreter) but I tried

IPython a couple of times. Perhaps I didn't really get

it, but I get the feeling that the ideas behind IPython

are pretty different to bpython. I didn't want to create

a whole development environment; I simply wanted to

provide a couple of neat features that already exist

and turn them into something a little more interactive.

The idea is to provide the user with all the features

in-line, much like modern IDEs, but in a simple,

lightweight package that can be run in a terminal

window, so curses seemed like the best choice.

Sorry if you use Windows.

bpython doesn't attempt to create anything new or

groundbreaking, it simply brings together a few neat

ideas and focuses on practicality and usefulness.

For this reason, the "Rewind" function should be

taken with a pinch of salt, but personally I have

found it to be very useful. I use bpython now

whenever I would normally use the vanilla interpreter,

e.g. for testing out solutions to people's problems

on IRC, quickly testing a method of doing something

without creating a temporary file, etc..

I hope you find it useful and please feel free to

submit any bugs/patches (yeah right)/suggestions

to:

robertanthonyfarrell@gmail.com

Features

========

* In-line syntax highlighting.

This uses Pygments for lexing the code as you type,

and colours appropriately. Pygments does a great job

of doing all of the tricky stuff and really leaving

me with very little to do except format the tokens

in all my favourite colours.

* Readline-like autocomplete with suggestions displayed

as you type.

Thanks to Python's readline interface to libreadline

and a ready-made class for using a Python interpreter's

scope as the dataset, the only work here was displaying

the readline matches as you type in a separate curses

window below/above the cursor.

* Expected parameter list.

As in a lot of modern IDEs, bpython will attempt to

display a list of parameters for any function you

call. The inspect module is tried first, which works

with any Python function, and then pydoc if that fails,

which seems to be pretty adequate, but obviously

in some cases it's simply not possible. I used pyparsing

to cure my nested parentheses woes; again, it was

nice and easy.

* Rewind.

I didn't call this "Undo" because I thought that would

be misleading, but "Rewind" is probably as bad. The

idea is that the code entered is kept in memory and

when the Rewind function is called, the last line is

popped and the entire code is re-evaluated. As you can

imagine, this has a lot of potential problems, but for

defining classes and functions, I've found it to be

nothing but useful.

* Pastebin code/write to file.

I don't really use the save thing much, but the pastebin

thing's great. Hit a key and what you see on the screen

will be sent to a pastebin and a URL is returned for you

to do what you like with. I've hardcoded rafb.net/paste

in for now, that needs to be fixed so it's configurable.

Next release, I promise.

* Flush curses screen to stdout.

A featurette, perhaps, but I thought it was worth noting.

I can't personally recall a curses app that does this,

perhaps it's often not useful, but when you quit bpython,

the screen data will be flushed to stdout, so it basically

looks the same as if you had quit the vanilla interpreter.

Known Bugs

==========

* There's some weirdness when you use rewind sometimes with how

it displays the text afterwards, I haven't had enough time to

sit down and look at exactly what's causing it, as it doesn't

seem to happen a lot, and it fixes itself pretty quickly anyway.

* Triple quoted strings over multiple lines work, but they're

not highlighted properly.

* There is no way to configure the keys or the pastebin options,

this is a definite for the next release.