# The Interactive Gerbil Shell

The interactive shell that you get when you run gxi is a larger environment than the Gerbil core language. It imports the :gerbil/gambit prelude and also provides some functionality that is mainly useful for interactive development.

# Interactive Development Macros

These macros are only available in the interactive shell.

# reload

(reload module-path ...)

Reloads the module given by the module path and then imports the freshly reloaded module. The module path is the same as you would use in a import form; a string will reload a source loaded module while a library module path will reload a compiled module as applicable in the load path. Top defined modules are ignored.

# enter!

(enter! module-path)

Starts a repl using the syntactic context of a given module, which is first evaluated.

# @expand and @expand1

(@expand form)
(@expand1 form)

These two macros perform macro expansion, pretty print the result, and return the expanded syntax for inspection. The difference lies in the function used to perform the expansion. @expand uses core-expand* which expands until the outer form is a core macro. @expand1 uses core-expand1 which performs a single step expansion.

# macro-expand and macro-expand1

(macro-expand quoted-form)
(macro-expand1 quoted-form)

Procedural forms of @expand and @expand1.

# Customizing the Interactive Shell

Whenever gxi is run interactively, after loading and initializing the runtime and expander, it loads the library interactive initialization file $GERBIL_INSTALL_PREFIX/lib/init.ss (source: init.ss) which greets the user, imports the :gerbil/gambit prelude module and provides the interactive development forms documented above.

After loading the library initialization file, gxi checks for a user specific interactive initialization file. If the file ~/.gerbil/init.ss exists, then it is loaded in the top (interaction) environment. This allows you to customize your interactive Gerbil shell.

Here is a small example ~/.gerbil/init.ss that provides useful functionality:

;;; -*- Gerbil -*-

;; add your work environment's source tree to the load path
(add-load-path "/path/to/your/gerbil/project/src")

;; only useful if you intend to do core Gerbil development
;; (add-load-path (path-expand "src" (getenv "GERBIL_SRCDIR")))

;; import your personal gerbil libraries
(import :my/stuff :more/of/my/stuff)