Among the many things that makes Repl.it special is our ability to provide free compute to millions of users. We’ve built a platform that not only lets you write and run code, but also gives you access to a Linux container through which you can execute arbitrarily complex commands. Despite being such a powerful feature, we haven’t done a great job of exposing that capability to its fullest.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re rolling out a redesign of the shell as a separate tab next to the console. Although we’ve already had a shell, this new redesign helps make it a more integral part of the experience in a repl. Here’s what it looks like:
Now it’ll be easier than ever to switch between viewing your program’s output in the console and executing bash commands in the shell. This will also greatly benefit beginners that are new to Linux since it will expose them to an easy to use shell that they can play around with in any repl.
Note that you can still use the existing keyboard shortcut (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + S) to open and focus the shell in addition to the new tab UI.
If you have any comments or feedback, please let us know on Canny. We’d love to hear it!