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commented
2 years ago You have much more experience with thonny than I do, but I've been trying to use it as much as possible to get familiar.
Based on my experience so far I definitely agree we should describe it in Chapt 2. There are stubs for it in the wired and wifi connections, but I've not written anything. I'd welcome any draft text that you want to put in those subsections.
I think the issue whether to put it before or after BeagleTerm is mostly about Chromebook users -- I think I remember correctly that you need developer privileges to install it on a Chromebook, which most students will not have. So the concern is making those students feel like they have to use the second best method.
That said it may do the most good for the most readers to have thonny be the default platform. My inclination right now is to ask the group on Tuesday if they have opinions, with the presumptive outcome being to put thonny first unless the group feels that would be exclusive. I think we can handle this gracefully with a few sentences at the beginning of that chapter.
I'm not sure what's up with mpfshell. When I get an ESP32-S2 board, I'm happy to fiddle with it if you haven't resolved the issue by then.
It appears that the ESP32-S2 is not communicating well over either WebREPL or mpfshell. It works fine in Thonny, although the Mac version of Thonny does not always detect the port automatically.
Given Thonny's stability and its rapid adoption rate, I'm inclined to add a section on Thonny in Chapter 2, perhaps between the sections on BeagleTerm and mpfshell--or maybe before BeagleTerm. To keep things organized, it may be best to remove references to any terminal or IDE from chapter 1.
I think the material on mpfshell could still be included because it provides a handy command-line interface. However, if we can confirm it won't work with the ESP32-S2, maybe Thonny is a good replacement.
Handling WebREPL is a more difficult issue. Here, I think time will probably solve the problem so I would not suggest making changes. However, it's worth thinking about what to do WebREPL is not completely supported by the newer ESP chips.