Within the Pluto notebook isinteractive() returns false

[vojtamolda]

Dear developers here,

First, thanks a lot for creating such a nice package! It's probably my favorite Julia project.

When moving over some of my work from REPL, I noticed that the return value from isinteractive() is always false within the notebook. I think this is a bug because the standard Julia REPL returns true and I believe the Pluto notebooks are very interactive :)

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I've attached a screenshot and the actual notebook file for reproducing the problem.

• interactive_bug.jl.zip

[cstjean]

It's not clear what isinteractive is supposed to imply (and what it's meant to be used for), but IMO an interactive session should support readline, which Pluto does not.

[vojtamolda]

Thanks for the response. Yeah, you're probably right. I just checked and Jupyter notebooks return the same value. So this probably isn't a bug.

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On a more general level, is there a way for a piece of code to tell that it's running in a Pluto.jl notebook?

[cstjean]

Check "Not really hooks but internally very hook-ish" in PlutoHooks

[pankgeorg]

Thanks for the report! I'll close this for now, but keep the reports coming; we love hearing from you! ❤️ 🎉

[vojtamolda]

Yep. Makes total sense to close this. Thanks for your help gentlemen!

[fonsp]

The official API is https://plutojl.org/en/docs/abstractplutodingetjes/#is_inside_pluto

[fonsp]

To answer the original question, Pluto is indeed interactive 🐣 but Base.isinteractive() is supposed to return: "is this Julia process in a TTY terminal with user input"? And the answer in Pluto is no, since we have no stdin (because that is very hard to implement in a sensible way).