Reinitialize scene without having to quit and then restart Manim (Reload)

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The current workflow already supports interactive previewing through checkpoint_paste(). We also have the clear() command. The latter is however sometimes not sufficient. E.g. imagine you have a class that resides outside of the Manim scene class. If you change anything in that class, you're forced to

• quit your active Manim session
• then restart it

such that the changes take effect. This process feels a bit disruptive for me since the whole ManimGL preview is closing and then completely re-initializing again. And this is also sometimes necessary when previewing parts of the scene since the caching mechanism does not cater for every situation, e.g. when you changed too much in the scene it's often better to completely reload.

Tip

That's why I ask if there exists some kind of restart() command in the IPython shell that we could use to trigger a complete scene restart without having to quit and restart via manimgl?

This command could by default reinitialize the scene at the same line number that was originally passed to manimgl to start the IPython kernel. Additionally, restart() could take the line number as parameter, which would be useful when you have edited the file and thereby also added/removed lines.

Such a command would greatly improve the UX, allow for quicker prototyping and therefore foster a more playful approach to math and animation, with probably even less waiting time. Thanks a lot for Manim in general, it's an awesome tool you have created there!

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I've opened a pull request for a new reload() command here.

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This reload() command is now available in the master branch 🎉 Its module loading will be improved via my new PR #2257.

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And I've opened #2252 to init an autoreload mechanism where you don't even have to type reload() anymore.