A better Python REPL – bpython vs python interpreter

Key Takeaways

hello this Daniel I want to show you a cool little tool and that I actually use a lot for Python development and it is called the Python and it is an alternative rep whole or alternative interpreter for the Python programming language I'm gonna show B Python to you in a minute but to give you a motivating example let's just boot up the regular Python interpreter here just in my terminal right it starts right up I can go ahead and define a little function here and I actually have to go in and fix the intonation myself and I need to remember what the print statement is called in that case the print function so yeah I want this thing to say hello to whatever the name is that gets passed in and so we're defining this here and we're gonna make it say hello Daniel run it okay it works that's pretty cool but the sad thing really is that we can't we don't get any syntax highlighting here so the this is actually really hard to read if you're used to a programming environment like sublime text or like a more fancy IDE even so this is really not that great if you're doing a lot of work in the Python repple here and then also if you're exploring a new module or new library then it's a pretty bare-bones environment for that too so let's say we want to play with the math library here and just kind of see what it has to offer pretty much have to call that their function here on it to see what the available attributes and functions are in here so let's say I'm interested in the math dot seal function to get some help on that I'd have to pretty much type all this stuff out manually and then I get the the doc string displayed and the function definition for the seal function so that kind of sucks I lose all my contacts I can't see the the other code I have on my screen here and it's not super awesome it gets a job done it can be made better with some tweaks to give you autocomplete but really not much beyond that so we're going to quit that interpreter by hitting ctrl D and drop back to the shell and so what I'm going to show you now is this alternative interpreter that it's called B Python and it's pretty much the same thing as Python was before but it has a couple of extra features that I think make it a really really nice tool and just make playing with a Python repple a lot more enjoyable so as I work through this example again you can already tell that some things are different here first of all you get some syntax highlighting here so we can see that the different tokens in that line are actually also highlighted differently and get different colors which is really awesome and much much much easier on the eyes we also get a feature that does highlighting for matching parentheses we can also be handy if you're editing like a really long string with nested parentheses and the good news is it actually does the indentation automatically for us this time so as I go ahead and type out my print function here I can actually use the autocomplete that is also offered by B Python so I can just hit the tab key and it'll run through the different options that were offered here and now I can just keep on going and I saved a couple of characters typing this out the other really cool thing is is if I make a syntax error in here so let's say we're using you know the wrong kind of parentheses to complete that line I get the the syntax error printed out and I can tell okay something went wrong the cool thing is now that I can hit ctrl R to rewind that last action and it'll even show up here in my history as this kind of ghosted line here and I can just fix my syntax error and then commit that and I've now defined that say hello function successfully you can give it the same the same example here and what's also really cool is that just to show it works as I type this out you can see that I get the function definition for this again and if it has a doc string it would also show the doc string so let's clear that out the other cool thing that I find really helpful is the autocomplete and help functionality for exploring modules or just kind of seeing what modules have to offer so let's import the math module again and again here you can tell it even does autocomplete frees modules as I type out em and then a and then T it kind of narrows down to autocomplete until only math it's left and can import it right away so now where previously I have to use the dur function I can just go and type out math and input a dot and the autocomplete shows me all of the symbols or I guess functions and attributes it finds in there that I can then reference so let's say we're looking for the seal function it's just autocomplete adhere type and open parentheses and now I actually get the function definition and the dock string for that displayed in line so I don't lose any of my my context here I know exactly what I typed before and I can learn all about that is to know about the seal function and then we're just gonna call it passing a value yeah numbers get highlighted differently too and I think that is really really awesome and the good news is you it doesn't require any configuration at all like once you've installed it you're you're done and you don't have to fiddle with any interpreter config files to get the functionality that I've just shown you so again we're gonna quit this now and I want to show you real quick how you can install B Python if you haven't if you haven't installed it already alright so you just go ahead and do a pip install B Python I recommend using sudo for it because then it becomes available globally so this can be handy in some situations obviously if you're using a virtual end of 10 it's probably better to put it in there but that command will get you started so if you run that it'll ask you for your root password and obviously I already had it installed but then you're ready to go and you can jump right in and play with B Python yeah let me know how that worked for you and say hi on Twitter if you if you enjoyed that and want to talk about this stuff all right take care