People who have been reading my blog for a while may remember Reinteract. I haven’t written anything about it here for a while, but I’ve still been working on it; usually in a spurts of a few weeks of evening hacking at a time. I’m going to be talking about Reinteract at Pycon this weekend, which inspired me to go ahead and finish up something worth calling a release. Reinteract 0.5.0: Source, installers for Windows and OS X.

One big change over the last year is the notebook user interface. Any decent size project is going to have multiple worksheets along with the Python libraries and data files that they use. The Reinteract main window now represents a notebook – an entire project – instead of a single worksheet.

Another major effort was porting Reinteract to Windows and OS X. Since Python and GTK+ already worked on these platforms, it was mostly a question of putting together existing pieces. But there was quite a bit of work to get things installed properly, and to create slick installers that combine Reinteract with the libraries and Python modules it depends upon. On OS X, I also wrote some native code to get a proper global menu.

With the new version, the work of computing a Reinteract worksheet occurs in a separate thread; this allows the user interface to stay responsive during long running operations. And allows you to interrupt running operations, which is a very handy thing to have if you accidentally write an infinite loop, or start some calculation that’s going to take a year to finish.

And of course, there are lots of bug fixes and small features as well. I’ve had useful suggestions, bug reports, and patches from a great number of people. I’d like to thank Kai Willadsen and Jon Kuhn in particular for their active contributions. Among other things, Kai recently landed a change that makes the replot module considerably more useful: instead of being restricted to a single plot command, you can use all the methods of the matplotlib Axes object.

Completion

Tooltip showing documentation

Tooltip showing variable contents

The majority of features in my completion design notes are now implemented. (The design took the bold and innovative approach of “copy how completion works in Eclipse”). The main thing that’s still missing is assist for function parameters. But I’ll probably leave that to the side for the moment and turn to notebooks. And catching up with some bugs fixes. For one thing, the code used to format the variable tooltips should be easily reusable to fix a reported problem where accidentally displaying a large array in Reinteract makes it dead-slow.

1. Follow the instructions in the PyGTK FAQ to install Python, GTK+, and PyGTK.
2. Download and install NumPy and SciPy from www.scipy.org.
3. Download and install the latest version of matplotlib.
4. Download and install TortoiseCVS. (Will likely require a reboot since it’s a shell extension)
5. Right click on your desktop, and select “CVS Checkout…”
6. Enter “:pserver:anonymous@git.fishsoup.net:/srv/git/reinteract.git” into CVSROOT (without the quotes), and “master” into the Module (without the quotes). (Fetch List.. won’t work). Click OK
7. Rename the resulting folder from “master” to “reinteract”
8. Go into reinteract/bin and double click on”uninst”
9. You can play around, or use File/Open to open the examples from reinteract/examples

It seems to work pretty well. Caveats I know about:

• replay and the “play” example won’t work. (An easy project for somebody who knows how to get Python to play sounds on Windows)
• There’s a bug in the cairo backend for matplotlib-0.90.1 which will cause non-square images to not work. (The images in the imshow example are square…) It’s pretty easy to fix up: just edit C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\matplotlib\backends\backend_cairo.py and in draw_image(), change “rows, cols, row*4″ to “cols, rows, cols*4″.
• Saving over an existing file doesn’t work (should be an easy fix)
• The GTK+ and PyGTK versions in the installers referenced above are a bit out of date. So they aren’t exactly what I’ve been testing with, though they seem to work fine. (There’s one bug triggered when deleting multiple lines and results, but that’s also in the latest released version of GTK+, 2.12.1, and only fixed in subversion.)

• www.reinteract.org – a Trac installation for wiki and issue tracking.
• Reinteract Google Group – for development and other discussion
• cgit – web browsing of the git repository
• A read-only CVS mirror of the git repository for those in git-challenged environments

Everything is a bit raw and not fully configured, but should be better than having all the discussion in blog comments and my private mail. Next up on my plate is integrating the patches people have sent me.

The inline plot part can be found in Nicolas Rougier’s Pylab GTK Console, but other than that, it’s just the standard Python interactive mode in a GTK+ window. IPython has a lot of features but it’s still a shell in a terminal. So, I decided to create something myself. A couple of months of occasional evenings and 4000 lines of Python later, Reinteract is beginning to shape up. A screencast of it in operation can be found below:

Screencast (5 minutes)

I’m not ready to make a tarball release yet, but you can get the code out of git. (Instructions here.) The chances of it working out-of-the-box on a recent Linux system are pretty good. In theory, it should be completely portable to Windows and even to gtk-quartz on OS/X, but figuring out the details would take some work.

P.S. – Python shell envy within the Online Desktop / Mugshot team? It’s really a pretty different sort of thing from Colin’s project.