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prompt-toolkit
ptpython
Python2015–2025
prompt-toolkit / ptpython

ptpython

A better Python REPL

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
21Distinct people
25Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
5.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A better Python REPL

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

A similar tool that I love: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython

jpetrucc used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 11:56:56 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year25 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-01-26 01:49:20 UTC to 2025-07-23 18:36:28 UTC.

02462015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 5 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC651
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC321
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

25 sources
karolinepauls·Mar 23, 2025
Because not everyone wants to be a part of the asyncio trend. Asyncio in Python is a poor feature that splits the language's ecosystem into 2 mutually-incompatible worlds, something Python only gets away with because it's too big to fail. Meanwhile we've had Gevent for decades now. It gives us async that you can forget you have. Because rather than making code async, it makes the VM async. Gevent could have been merged into CPython, but they chose explicit "structured concurrency" and the rest is history. History of sometimes moving forward and sometimes straying from the path and getting lost. And lost Python's asyncio is. PDB, which lots of other debuggers base on, is still broken (cannot use await). The ecosystem? IPython uses asyncio internally so it cannot easily be embedded in a working async program. The only embeddable REPL I was
Read the rest
able to find is this: https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython/blob/master/examp...... actually, it looks like someone is working on adding `await` support to PDB now, years after asyncio's first release. Overall, lots of churn to get something (maybe) as good as Gevent, which we had in Python 2.7, or even before. If a similar amount of effort was spent on first-class support for code hot-reloading and live program inspection, we would get a massive boost of productivity. But somehow even otherwise bright people choose to reimplement working solutions into something objectively worse, meanwhile our development/debugging loop still emulates loading punchcards into mainframes.
In Show HN: FastOpenAPI – automated docs for many Python frameworks
njt·Sep 9, 2020
You can check out download stats stats for Urwid on PyPI Stats [1], that should give you a decent idea of its popularity. Also check out the list of applications built with Urwid [2]. Probably the two most popular applications that use Urwid are bpython [3] (an alternative Python REPL that is really nice), and PUDB [4] (a nice Python debugger that is reminiscent of Borland's Turbo Pascal). I use bpython all the time, it's a lifesaver, and I occasionally fire up PUDB when I am really stuck on something. I've used Urwid in a couple of projects (most notably Zeitzono [5]), it's nice in that it's fairly high level and gives you a number of helpful widgets to work with. Starting with it from scratch is a little daunting, so you should look at existing projects to see how they are using the library. Also, I believe Urwid development has slowed
Read the rest
down somewhat in the last few years (although other folks maybe stepping up to take over from the original author, I haven't follow up on this in a while). Also definitely take a look at Python Prompt Toolkit [6]. They started off as library for writing line-oriented command interpreters, but now can also be used for building full screen applications. I've not yet built an application using it, but it looks really good and is actively developed. ptpython [7] is a REPL built using this library and gives bpython a run for its money. [1] https://pypistats.org/packages/urwid [2] https://github.com/urwid/urwid/wiki/Application-list [3] https://bpython-interpreter.org/ [4] https://github.com/inducer/pudb [5] https://zeitzono.org/ [6] https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/python-prompt-toolkit [7] https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython
In Ask HN: Recommendations for Good TUI Libraries (Text User Interface)?
artwr·Nov 19, 2018
A few of the ones I use almost daily - Pandoc a handy document format converter: https://pandoc.org/ - Ripgrep, a faster grep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - There are quite a few prompt-toolkit based CLI which have been really nice: * mycli (https://github.com/dbcli/mycli), pgcli (https://github.com/dbcli/pgcli) * ptpython/ptipython (https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython) - Youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ - fzf a fuzzy finder for the console: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf - jq for JSON manipulation: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ - Miller for CSV/TSV: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller I would imagine you have already scoured the "awesome" lists: https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps#terminal-utili...
In Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

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