General-Purpose Graphical Janet REPL

Janet REPL in the image of Self and gtoolkit.

Demo Video

I'll try to make this a much better REPL than the terminal one (janet).

This program is developed together with dvui.

Building

To run the program, run zig build run -- imgfile with Zig 0.11.0. (If you use wayland, set environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland.)

How it works

Knowledge of Janet is required.

• Write code in the text field.
• "Do It" executes the code in text field.
• "Get It" executes the code and give the result a name.
• Pressing Enter at the end of text field = "Get It".
• Each top-level definition (def, var) that starts with _ will be a window. _ is a special variable that represents current object/window (when writing code in the text field).
• The window shows object representation live.

Caveat

• cfunction cannot be persisted. imported library might have cfunction.

To do

• unique def for each window/object (all starts with _)
• closable windows (delete variable on close)
• "Do it" and "Get it"
• unclosable root window with demo window toggle
• persist env to file
• different view tabs (like in gtoolkit)
• Define view protocol (like {_ :dview})
• "broadcast variable name" button (via subscription system in Janet)
• open Janet REPL on stdin
• auto persist?

• clean up

Wild thoughts, but probably out of scope.

• support Python and IPython display protocol