zsh-python-mode
Disclaimer: This entire thing is a heap of half-baked, unfinished, not well documented code. Don't judge me bro.
This bit of zsh configuration aims to provide a ui frontend for seamless use of python in an interactive zsh session, making use of zyx's excellent zsh/zpython module. That module is (at the time of this writing) not part of the regular zsh distribution, so you will likely have to compile it yourself. It should work with the unmodified source from zyx's repository.
This was kind of a weekend project for me when I needed a break from other stuff. I'm not sure if this feature ever finds its way into my workflow, it might just as well turn out to be fruitless endeavour.
Anyways I still find the idea rather interesting, so I decided to take a couple screenshots and upload it. If you have some ideas on what could be done differently or nicer (especially with the variable integration parts), hit me up in #zsh on freenode :)
The gist of it
The entire thing is pretty much just one widget, zpy-enable. Installation
boils down to copying the zpy-enable file into your fpath (or adding the
repository dir to $fpath), then autoloading and binding the widget. See
example.config.zsh for more on this.
Calling this widget will enter a mode that interprets commands as python rather than zsh. It moves a few things around, but will generally try to change as little in actual editing behavior as possible. The mode will stay enabled until ^D is pressed on an empty line, the zpy-enable widget is called again, or the line is aborted (^C).
Syntax highlighting requires the zsh-syntax-highlighting loaded and pygments installed to work. To get completion support, jedi needs to be installed.
Variable interpolation
There are two syntax extensions added to interactively executed python code,
for a more seamless integration. Firstly, expressions of the form $var
anywhere in the code are replaced by zsh.getvalue("var"). While this is a
fairly hackish way to go about it, this results in fairly natural variable
interpolation, allowing well-typed use in more complex expressions with proper
scoping.
Secondly, the same type of expression at the beginning of a line followed by an
assignment operator as in $var = expr will be replaced by
zsh.setvariable("word", expr). This is even more hackish, doesn't work
anywhere in expressions or anything, but provides a convenient way to assign
zsh variables. For a more robust method, zpython can bind python variables to
zsh special variables.
Hints and caveats
-
the python session is bound to the zsh process. To reset it, run
exec zsh -
variable interpolation also replaces $word inside strings, leading to a to a parse error or even undefined behavior. I plan to fix this and have a couple of ways to go about it in mind but none yet that really feels right. leaving this as a todo for now.
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getting ^C, ^D, and ^M to behave involved a number of rather ugly hacks. I'm happy with the resulting behavior, but there might be corner cases I didn't take into consideration.
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multiline commands work weirdly and output will often be obscured by the prompt. this is a consequence of the zle recursive-edit technique used, unfortunately I couldn't get this to behave properly. :(