Hi! So I recently moved to glitch because Replit made some changes that I didn’t like, and there were some features that Replit had that were better than Glitch, but the changes Replit made were pretty awful, so I wanted to make a couple suggestions to bring Glitch over the top and better than Replit.
Custom themes.
Replit has a feature where people can create and share custom themes that change the background color, text color, and some other things.
Python support - Updated
So I am a python coder. I loved sharing python projects that weren’t flask and were up-to-date with the python version. I would like to see an official python feature added into Glitch that was up-to-date with the python version, and created urls for flask websites. I had a project going that basically had a flask server in one file, and then another file called the flask server, and this created an awesome feature where I can keep something always on using UptimeRobot. I know that is against the Glitch terms of use, but it was still a nice feature to have that.
Built-In community.
Replit had a community right inside the website. the had a support forum, but you could go to their community page and see projects that were shared, and it also had a great comment feature where when you publish a project, people can see and comment on your project. The comment feature was removed by replit recently, and it was soooo sad. The community is great for programmers like me. I can get feedback, and it is all hosted on the platform.
I love what you do
Even without these features, Glitch is such a great place. It allows free domains, and Replit also removed that feature, too. I want you to learn, and I think other former Replit users will agree, but the awesome part about Replit was the free domains, and when they took that a way, and someone even said this on Replit’s forums “It turned into a bad Github.”
Glitch has the chance to become great now that Replit made some bad decisions, and actually, Replit lost a lot of the people who used it.
As I said, this is a great program with the potential to grow to be awesome.
Honestly, I would love all of them. Specially python support, I really love how in replit you can actually open real native windows and use python to manage them (just like kind of a virtual machine) and also how much easily it is to interact with python projects via the terminal.
There’s a container update happening Q1 this year so you might be in luck. Or for now search for ‘Narflinger’ on this forum for installing newer python versions on glitch.
I feel like running interactive programs that take i/o from stdin/stdout can easily be solved by a lightweight wrapper program that creates a wetty like terminal with a run button as a website that invokes a command of your choice, maybe I’ll put this on a todo list for next summer as a rust exercise for myself.
And then of course, the user doesn’t have to worry about that as much, they can just remix a template with the server preconfigured. I mainly despise wetty for the startup overhead, I think I had a project misconfigured so it took 5 minutes to startup wetty (installing dependencies somehow took a long timee).
Hey! So I started to do some experimenting, and I was hoping to have increased resources! I’m trying to bring in the latest Python but I found myself running out of resources (disk space).
Well it’s not impossible, there’s a workaround I have and I’m sure you can condense Python to fit within the Glitch free project limits to remove the need for a workaround. My workaround extracts Python into a temporary directory that has more than enough storage, and then installs any dependencies found in requirements.txt, and then runs your program from app.py. I’m gonna try and see if virtualenv helps, and a few other ideas I have. Tested my current setup with a Bottle webserver and it seems to work fine (abeit with a long startup delay). Glitch kept the caching of responses on the glitch.me URL so I had to open up the terminal and hit the server locally to see up-to-date responses (though this is 99% unrelated?)
