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Sometimes I don’t feel like going all around the world on the Internet to accomplish something I can do on my local laptop. Somehow it can feel… slow, or wasteful (although it’s rarely either) to send my bits out into the great pandemonium of planetary data centres, only to have them come right back to where they started – while equivalent functionality sits unused on my rarely-breaks-a-sweat computer.

I’ve been playing with Dart and Flutter lately, and wanted a simple way to evaluate basic Dart code – so I recently made a little REPL that’s available in my tmux environment. The left pane is a Vim window with a main() entry point open, which is evaluated in the right pane whenever the file is saved. That’s it!

Uh, wait, you say – couldn’t you just use DartPad?.. Yes! Absolutely. Or repl.it for that matter, which is pretty great too. And neither of those options requires any setup or mucking with config files.

But sometimes I’d rather keep it local.

I am a Code Wrangler at Automattic, helping make WordPress.com the best it can be. Pender Island, British Columbia, Canada is where I call home. Lover, not a fighter. View all posts by Kirk Wight