Zamansky 65: Live Python

Mike Zamansky has another video up in his Using Emacs Series. This time the video is about the live-py-plugin. The link takes you to the master GitHub repository that has code for Emacs, PyCharm, and Sublime Text. There’s a tutorial by the author for using it with Emacs here.

The idea is that as you type Python statements, the results are shown in another window. What gets shown can be quite complex. For instance, the code

for i in range(5):
    print(i+1)

will show the result for each value of i. That’s not too surprising but

def factorial (n):
    if (n==1):
        return 1
    else:
        return n*factorial(n-1)

factorial(5)    

will show you the results of factorial(5), factorial(4),⋯, factorial(1) so it’s a nice way of seeing what your code is doing. Zamansky shows the factorial example and a slightly more complex case of the first example so you can see the live-py results in action. It’s a nice package and worth taking a look at if you’re a Python programmer.

The video is comparatively short—about 8 and a half minutes—so you should be able to fit it in easily.