Change "current working module" from REPL

General Usage
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In package development, I often find myself needing to bring lots of things into scope, so I can run bits and pieces as if my package were running them. Something like

julia> using Foo # or some package I'm developing
julia> using Foo: f, g, h, j
julia> using Bar # a dependency of `Foo`

etc.

It’s a lot of typing, and it’s very error prone. It would be a lot easier if we had a way to change modules from the REPL. Is this possible? Or maybe there’s an easy way to automate what I’m currently doing?

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I don’t have an answer to your specific request, but if you only want to run a few isolated expressions, you can use @eval M expr to tell that you want to evaluate expr in module M. Or if it’s a larger piece of code that is written in a file, you can use M.include(file) or Base.include(M, file).

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Also, since you are telling explicitly that you would like to change the working module in the REPL, I guess that you already know of how to do it in other environments. But anyway, I think that it is worth to comment that in VS Code you can choose the module where each file is meant to be run (also for “inline execution” with Alt+Enter etc.).

image

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Really helpful suggestions, thank you @heliosdrm !

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You could also give this Gist a go:

julia> changeREPLmodule(Base)

Base> @__MODULE__
Base

Base> Main.changeREPLmodule(Main)

Main> @__MODULE__
Main

Juno also automatically changes the REPL module to the current module, while VSCode doesn’t (as pointed out above).

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This works beautifully! Unfortunately help mode and REPL completion doesn’t see that the module has changed.

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There’s now a built in way to do this - type the module name in the REPL and press ALT-m. Or use the REPL.activate() function.

Implemented in REPL: allow switching contextual module by rfourquet · Pull Request #33872 · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub. Just leaving a note here so that people finding this old discussion via google can find the modern solution.

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