REPL is missing

[chipkent]

I’m really feeling the lack of a REPL. Every time I want to execute a small bit of code, I find myself typing it out, highlighting it, running it, and then deleting it. Not a great workflow.

[bmingles]

I've opened a ticket in web-client-ui to possibly expose console features that the extension could use. deephaven/web-client-ui#2111

[bmingles]

Looks like there is an api that allows interacting via vscode terminal. Here's an example: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-extension-samples/blob/main/extension-terminal-sample/src/extension.ts

[dsmmcken]

Looking at the terminal API, it doesn't have the feature we would need to implement a repl.

Other than a terminal, vs code doesn't have a paradigm of a rich interactive repl. You can display a python repl in terminal but there's no equivalent rich experience in vs code. There are no APIs or building blocks to create similar experience, so any implementation would be sub-optimal and a lot of work.

We can provide a link to open a repl in a browser from your current connected worker. And/or if the deephaven server command implemented a -i / --interactive or -repl mode we could display that in the terminal.

I don't think we should be trying to build our exact ide experience shoe-horned into vs code, we should build what the equivalent vs code experiences is in vs code, using the APIs they provide.

My interpretation of the underlying user need is a way to have quick iterative development, and the closest vs code equivalent experience would be vs code python notebooks. VS Code does have a python notebook api that we can explorer, and if possible I think that would be a better native VS code feeling experience. I know they aren't quite equivalent, but do fulfill a similar user need.