After reading some discussions on edu-sig, and with a little inspiration from Try Ruby, I've been playing around more with a web-based console, HTConsole. (Like several people now, I am lazily using the Cheese Shop page as the homepage.)

This isn't intended to be Yet Another Python Console; I'm really thinking more about this as a learning tool. And since I haven't really thought about the security implications, you'll have to install it yourself to try it. Maybe some of this later.

But really, the idea isn't to duplicate (or even improve ala ipython) the console experience (ignoring the name), except to use that as a starting point.

So far I've mostly just achieved that starting point, but if you poke around there's a couple places where I'm expanding on that. If you add something to the local scope (e.g., through an import or assignment), it shows up in a table at the bottom of the screen. (Though I'm going to have to figure out how to keep the screen from getting too long.) Objects can also be displayed in an interactive manner. A function, for instance, has an edit button; if you hit it, you can edit the function in place. I want to add self-editing features to more objects. Well, at least to classes and functions. And dicts. And lists too I guess. And property. So, okay, a bunch of things.

On edu-sig there's also been talk of doctesting, and that's another thing I want to add, just to select a doctest and run it against the environment.

Anyway, it's kind of fun I think, and thoroughly non-enterprise; not even suitable for serious programming. That lends a sense of freedom. You install it like:

easy_install htconsole
... lots of junk passes by ...
htconsole
... web browser pops up with console ...

At least, I think this is all it should take to install.

Now to figure out some of the tricky Python magic to edit more objects in place...