Python Turtle graphics for Jupyter notebooks
For a quick demo, open the lab notebook.
The idea and some of the code for this module was inspired by Tolga Atam's ColabTurtle, which I got to know reading a pre-print version of Allen Downey's book Think Python, Third Edition (O'Reilly, 2024).
Atam's best idea was to use SVG for drawing, which makes the
code simple and lightweight, requiring no special dependencies
besides the ipython module that is always available in Jupyter.
This is a rewrite from scratch, using classes to model the turtle and the drawing—to make it easier to test, maintain and evolve by avoiding global variables to keep program state.
I created a fork—jupyturtle2—which
uses ipycanvas to draw on an HTML canvas, instead of generating SVG.
ipycanvas requires the binary dependencies numpy and pillow,
so it may be harder to deploy in some environments.
jupyturtle2 is better than jupyturtle in some respects, but worse in others.
I used metaprogramming techniques to build the procedural API
with global functions like fd() to move the turtle.
The techniques are easier to understand in the didactic project
abacus.
@ramalho