Beginner Q regarding stdout

[dc-acronym]

Apologies for the simple Q, Not sure if this is a Calva related question or a more general one:

When using the basilisp repo, I get fancy rich output to stdout using rich. When doing the same at the live connected calva repl, I don't. Am I missing something about how basilisp renders to stdout? Alternatively, is there a classier, more basilispy way for me to dunk object structure to get a sense of whats going on as I get up to speed? Thanks!

[ikappaki]

Hi @dc-acronym,

currently, the nREPL server only redirects the *out* stream to the client, meaning it captures output from core functions like pr, print, etc.

However, rich writes directly to sys/stdout, which is the terminal or window where the nREPL server was started. So, if you started the server with basilisp nrepl-server, the output would appear in that terminal:

 basilisp nrepl-server
nREPL server started on port 59975 on host 127.0.0.1 - nrepl://127.0.0.1:59975
{'a': 5}

Are you primarily interested in displaying Basilisp core structures? If so, you can try the https://github.com/ikappaki/basilisp-pprint pretty printer library, which provides the same interface as the Clojure pretty printer.

Alternatively, if you still want to use rich, you can redirect sys.stdout to *out* (and thus to the client) as follows:

(import rich contextlib)

(with [_ (contextlib/redirect_stdout *out*)]
      (rich/print {:a 5})

You might want to wrap this into a macro for convenience though.

I hope this helps!

[dc-acronym]

This is perfect, thanks!

Basilisp's pprint is 70% of what I was looking for (with the rich redirection covering the 30% of the time I'm too lazy to look up some python function)