Proposal: analogue of node's .editor for iex

[amitt...@agtinternational.com]

Hi all,

I've recently stumbled across the .editor feature in Node.js' REPL. It sets the REPL in to editor mode, which allows for easily inputting (or pasting) multi-line code into the REPL. 

With iex, one of its shortcoming is its treatment of the pipe operator. If I want to paste code such as

value
|> fun1()
|> fun2()

into iex I must first rewrite it into

value |> fun1() |> fun2()

As the former is usually the preferred style of writing piped expressions, this means that whenever I want to try out code from a project that contains any such expression I must first manually reformat it. With a functionality such as the .editor mode this could be elegantly avoided.

With the help of a macro this might be easily added, for example, as part of IEx.Helpers. If we had a macro `e` defined as

defmacro e(do: block) do
  quote do unquote(block) end
end

then `e` would become an editor mode like call in iex. For example, I could now write

iex> e do
...> 1..5
...> |> Enum.map(fn x -> x + 1 end)
...> end
[2,3,4,5,6]

allowing me to easily paste more complex expressions including pipes in new lines into iex.

Looking forward for feedback and comments.

Regards

Arno

[Wojtek Mach]

We can achieve the same thing today with wrapping pipeline in `(...)`:

iex(1)> (

...(1)> 1..5

...(1)> |> Enum.map(fn x -> x + 1 end)

...(1)> )

[2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

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Wojtek Mach

[amitt...@agtinternational.com]

That is even better. Thanks for the tip. 

What about adding a section "Pasting into iex" to https://hexdocs.pm/iex/IEx.html?

[Steve Morin]

Think that would be a good idea

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[José Valim]

Yes, please do send a pull request!

--

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

[amitt...@agtinternational.com]

will do.

[amitt...@agtinternational.com]

I've added a draft for the documentation: Link to pull request.