HACKER Q&A
📣 mettamage

Most Interactive REPL for Python?


I'm relearning Python, coming from JS (and having done Python in the past). I've watched a few videos, and it is coming back to me a bit.

What I wonder, is there a very visually interactive REPL? Chrome/Safari/Firefox dev tools have such an interactive REPL it's crazy. It's how I nowadays teach programming to people that are only a little bit interested in programming since they only need to download a browser to start. For example, Chrome dev tools has a debugger + pretty good text editor in the sources > snippets section.

I wonder if there's anything in Python that resembles that something as interactive. In many cases, you can also create a debugger type of environment in the JS console (e.g. type console.lg('hi'), the error will come up, click on VM set the breakpoint, rerun the statement in the console and now you are on your breakpoint).

  👤 eigenvalue Accepted Answer ✓
I usually just use the debug console in VScode since I find it so painful now to do any text/code editing without having something like copilot to fix and complete things for me. You can inspect the contents of variables and immediately evaluate expressions. But there are also iPython notebook viewing extensions for VScode which might be a bit easier if you're new to it.
👤 vasili111
Python interactive mode in VSCode: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/jupyter-support-py
👤 philomath_mn
If you just want a REPL, Jupyter Notebooks are hard to beat.

But if you also want a debugger, I'd recommend VS Code which has a flexible and useful debugger.

👤 gabrielsroka
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40309594
👤 vismit2000
ptpython: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython
👤 somesun
bpython ptpython ipython

but , i think the best way to learn and debug python is using vscode