Use Ammonite-style @ REPL prompt rather than scala>
#24307
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@lihaoyi The PR extracting the repl has been merged. Can you please rebase now and fix the conflicts? |
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@hamzaremmal Done |
| protected def promptStr = "scala" | ||
| private def prompt(using Context) = blue(s"\n$promptStr> ") | ||
| private def newLinePrompt(using Context) = blue(" | ") | ||
| protected def promptStr = "@" |
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@ is a cute symbol for ammonite (the name), but that cuteness does not apply for Scala in general. There's no precedent (that I know of) for this symbol being used as a general prompt anywhere.
I'm not against using a short prompt but then it should just be > like virtually all prompts in existence.
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A large motivation for the recent effort to renovate the REPL has been to merge all the useful parts of Ammonite into it: pretty-printed output, ctrl-c handling, library import, etc.. I expect Ammonite as a standalone project will go into maintenance mode soon after 3.8.0 is released.
Given that, @ looking like the Ammonite REPL is exactly what we want: for all intents and purposes, Ammonite going forward will be the default Scala REPL, and any association that people have with the @ symbol is exactly right.
We can come up with a new symbol, we can use > which is shared by a bunch of other REPLs. But @ is already widely known in the Scala community, has exactly the right associations (Scala REPL ++) and soon-to-be unambigious. So there's plenty of upsides of using this symbol and no long-term downsides
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Given that, @ looking like the Ammonite REPL is exactly what we want: for all intents and purposes, Ammonite going forward will be the default Scala REPL, and any association that people have with the @ symbol is exactly right.
...wait, slow down. While we very much appreciate all the improvements brought over from Ammonite REPL, Scala REPL remains its own thing. If anything, I think users may be confused with the @ being there. Some Ammonite REPL features won't be brought over (like the Ammonite style directives, for example).
I'm a fan of going with > myself, too.
We'll discuss how to move forward on Scala Core.
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Maybe instead of having long discussions, trying to figure out what would be best for users, maybe we could let them decide themselves? Personally, I've recently become a bit crazy about how one can make their life easier by customizing their shell prompt, but I wouldn't go too far for this moment. The prompt in the REPL could be configurable as a simple string (and maybe as a color) via a scala-cli flag (or potentially also via a directive to let people use a scala file as a template for REPL settings)
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...we probably could make whatever we decide on customisable, yeah. 😅
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I'm fine with > if that's what you all prefer, just let me know the decision and I'll update the PR
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I agree with the arguments against @
Gedochao
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OMG yes please!! Really happy to see this change included |
| private def newLinePrompt(using Context) = blue(" | ") | ||
| protected def promptStr = "@" | ||
| private def prompt(using Context) = purple(s"\n$promptStr ") | ||
| private def newLinePrompt(using Context) = purple(" ") |
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This is my personal preference. If we were to have a > on the first line then maybe it's best to have one also in the lines after that to be able to easily keeps things aligned.
| private def newLinePrompt(using Context) = purple(" ") | |
| private def newLinePrompt(using Context) = purple(">") |
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The problem with adding >s in subsequent lines is it makes copy paste harder. Without the > you just copy-paste-dedent, with the > you paste and the need to remove the > from each subsequent line, and also manually remove the space since it'll be one remaining space so a 2-space dedent doesnt work
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@lihaoyi hey, so we've discussed this on today's Scala Core and the conclusions were as follows:
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Gedochao
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This has several advantages:
|s for multi-line input makes it much easier to copy-paste later: you can copy-paste-dedent it, rather than copy-paste-remove-vertical-pipes-dedent like you needed to do before@is already associated with Scala due to widespread usage of Ammonite, so people seeing this would immediately know it's a Scala REPLMost languages REPLs do not have the name of the language in the prompt (e.g. Python is
>>>, IPythonIn [N], Rubyirb(main):001:0>, Node>, etc.) so it's not a hard requirement to have the language namescalain the REPL prompt