option to force isinteractive=true at startup

[stevengj]

Currently, isinteractive() returns false in IJulia (JuliaLang/IJulia.jl#173), and there is no way to change this because it is controlled by the Base.is_interactive global, which can't be changed outside of Base.

It might be good to have a way to force is_interactive=true by a command-line flag when Julia is started. You want to do this at startup, I think, because ideally it should be set before load_juliarc() is called.

[tknopp]

Yes this would be nice. I also observed this when working on Julietta.jl and implementing a Gtk-based terminal.

[JeffBezanson]

Might be too much to hope for, but it would be nice to get rid of isinteractive. I'm not sure there are any really compelling uses. It would be better to check more specific conditions, like whether stdin is a TTY. IJulia is a good example: ultimately there is an interactive user, but the process isn't set up that way.

[tknopp]

One use case I have is when I want to run a Gtk.jl application script. In non-interactive mode one has to add wait(Condition()) at the end of the script so that julia does keep running. When running from the REPL this is not really wanted (see JuliaGraphics/Gtk.jl#38)

I usually put

if(!isinteractive())
    wait(Condition())
end

at the end of my Gtk.jl applications

[simonster]

As a temporary solution, can't you do:

eval(Base, :(is_interactive = true))

[tknopp]

seems to work.

[stevengj]

Right, that works. But it might still be nice to have this for the .juliarc via a julia -i option (ala bash), e.g. I can imagine a user who wants to set up her .juliarc so that certain packages (e.g. for plotting) are automatically used in interactive mode.