interactive console

[shiffman]

I'm making this comment without knowledge of how large / complicated this work would be, but in thinking about ideas for the IDE this google summer of code, one thing that feels to me to be an important feature is an interactive console. Specifically for teaching and debugging (and teaching debugging), I've found the ability to execute JS directly in a browser console incredibly useful. The recent live coding work is possibly a nice substitute / companion to this.

[antiboredom]

You can access the javascript console in a running sketch by clicking the little gear icon in the output window. So, something is already in place, but it doesn't feel very integrated into the editor as a whole. Ideally it would live in the debug panel below the code, which is something that I'm pretty sure we can achieve, although I'm not sure how difficult it would be.

this might be helpful: https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/Devtools-jail-feature

[shiffman]

Ah, yes, it's great to see it there. I agree, however, that this would ideally move to the debug panel below the code as its awkward managing so many windows as well as confusing as to why there would be two different consoles with different features.

[shiffman]

It's also interesting to think about whether one might like to optionally attach the debug panel to the browser window, i.e. I might prefer sometimes (always?) to interact with and view the console working with the browser window vs. the code. I'm very unsure about this. I'm imagining something like: