bpython VS xonsh

bpython over built-in Python interpreter

Yeah, also it's worth to mention bpython

I use bpython, its a pretty cool python REPL, try it out

Yeah, mostly I lack time to catch up with Jonathan Slenders works, and have stronger backward compatibility requirements. b=But ptpython and pyipython are both great.

I should also look into Rich and Textual

https://bpython-interpreter.org/ is also another alternative python shell, and of course https://xon.sh

It's a nicer repl for python.

Python comes with IDLE as /usr/bin/idle but it doesn't have a corresponding .desktop file that would let it appear in the application menu. Otherwise, /usr/bin/python has an interactive mode and bpython is a wrapper around that interactive mode that has like syntax highlighting, indenting, undo, etc.

So, in this article, we will discuss bpython-django a fork from bpython that handles Django in a better way, currently it handles Models and can be extended as desired.

Someone posted bpython which I'm pretty ecstatic about but always good to know options.

I like the point raised by the author here about the power of elisp in the shell. For context, I've used emacs for well over a decade and write a good bit of elisp most weeks. However, I ended up finding elisp to be the wrong language for replacing a shell: it removes a lot of capabilities for not enough reward, imo: it's just the wrong abstraction because elisp's most natural transformations are very stateful and buffer based, and, additionally, it really doesn't provide that much expanded capability in the end (and this is despite the fact that I'm one of those people who would absolutely never leave my emacs environment even for web browsing if I could feasibly make it work consistently for the kinds of things I need).

However, despite disliking python, I found https://xon.sh/ to be really excellent and provides a lot of the benefits of eshell, but better, in my humble opinion: it has a well-enough structured base language that is essentially already built to be a library glue-code language, which works really well with the unix philosophy that traditional shells utilize (a good library is just a tool that does a thing really well).

(Not sure about the equivalent of shlex.quote, but in the worst case, you can just use "from shlex import quote as q" or something).

So yes, there are good alternatives to bash - even Python based.

[0] https://xon.sh/

Also, do consider xonsh.[1]

It's a Bash-like shell written in Python. It has significant overlap with the awesomeness of fish, and has the advantage of being able to write your shell scripts in a Python dialect. So if you know Python, the mental burden is much lower.

On top of that, it's cross platform, since Python is. No WSL needed.

I switched to it in 2018 and haven't looked back. Originally it was just because I wanted a better command prompt environment in Windows for work, but I liked it so much I switched to it in Linux as well.

(And yes, you can type any Python statement right in the command prompt).

[1] https://xon.sh/

No xonsh? (https://xon.sh/) Seems to hit most of the requirements.

Been happily using it since 2018. It's great not to have to learn a whole other language just to do scripting.

Interesting thought experiment. Reminds me of my cousin's project Xonsh https://xon.sh/

If you like this sort of thing, I strongly recommend also checking out the xonsh shell.

It's bash-like, but Python based. Works on both Windows and Linux. Has several of the benefits mentioned in this article. It's really nice that I don't need to learn another language for shell scripting - its language is Python, with some extensions to make it less tedious (e.g. easily executing commands without using os.system or subprocess).

Been using it since 2018.

https://xon.sh/