jupyturtle

Python Turtle graphics for Jupyter notebooks

For a quick demo, open the lab notebook.

To use on a live Jupyter Notebook, just download the jupyter.py file to the same folder where your notebook is saved, and import it.

Credits

The idea and some of the code for this module came from Tolga Atam's ColabTurtle, which I discovered reading a pre-print version of Allen Downey's book Think Python, Third Edition (O'Reilly, 2024).

Design

Atam's best idea was to use SVG for drawing, which makes the code simple and lightweight, requiring only the Python standard library and the ipython module that is always available in Jupyter.

This is a rewrite from scratch, using classes to model the turtle and the drawing. My goal was to make it easier to understand and extend by encapsulating the state.

I used metaprogramming techniques to build the procedural API with global functions like fd() to move the turtle. The techniques are easier to understand in the didactic project abacus.

Turtle on a canvas

jupyturtle2 is a fork that uses ipycanvas to draw pixels on an HTML canvas, instead of generating SVG, so it handles complex drawings better.

But jupyturtle2 has two main drawbacks:

• ipycanvas requires the binary dependencies numpy and pillow, which may be harder to install in some environments.

• the generated drawings are not saved with the notebook like most other output cells; this is also a limitation of ipycanvas

@ramalho