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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Next step: a try-it-on-the-web interface?

Doesn't that already exist on the NPM interface? The "try it now in your browser" which links to TonicDev. Or are you suggesting something else?

In that case, why would we need a CLI tool for trying out packages?

Offline capabilities + easier to use for some people (one of them being me). Loading up a webpage every time I want to try some new nodejs module would not work as well as opening up a nodejs repl with the module loaded there.

Obviously it won't work offline if you haven't already installed the package (which seems like the general case?)

I'm biased of course, and I understand why some people are turned off by an in browser solution. But I think it's probably faster, in most cases, to try something you've never installed in Tonic than in this. (And I hope there's genuine value in things like being able to share links to your experiments.)

Yeah, that is true for sure, difference being that the 10% use-case (installed package before, offline now) is still usable if it's local and not on tonic-dev.

I like tonic-dev, don't get me wrong. But the workflow for using a package in tonic-dev is too slow compared to having it in a REPL, at least for me. Might be because I'm using Firefox and the performance for tonic-dev is terrible there, but mostly because I feel more at home in the terminal than in a js-editor in the browser.

Understood. We definitely have work to do in Firefox.

I made something similar a while back : http://benvan.co.uk/js-quickload/

It only works with web libraries though. Try searching for 'moment.js'

The online REPL for my compile-to-js language uses JSPM to load NPM packages: http://www.earl-grey.io/repl.html

Try "require: markdown", for example.

I can put up a JavaScript version if it would be useful to anyone, it's not particularly complicated.

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