Reinitialize scene without having to quit and then restart (`reload()` command)

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This keeps track of the discussion I've opened here. Feel free to upvote there to increase its visibility ;)

TL;DR:

Tip

[...] That's why I ask if there exist 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?

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If you have further ideas related to this, please comment over at the discussion and not here.

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I'm thrilled to inform you that I've just opened a pull request for a new reload() command in the Manim repo here 🙌 Should this get merged, we can greatly improve our workflow in the extension.

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If you have any ideas what we could do with this command, let me know.

• I mean, it's so quick that we could offer a setting that runs reload() before every checkpoint_patse().
• Additionally, we could add a codelens Reload & Preview Manim Cell that could show up next to the normal Preview Manim Cell.
• We could also use this command to improve our scene startup: we don't have to quit and then respawn and do some complicated terminal detection logic, instead just call the restart() command with the correct line number.

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Maybe you could check out that code as well and see if it works for you? See this PR. I think, this will greatly improve the UX as we just have to use reload() and the window can stay open all the time. This reduces waiting times a lot on my end as initializing a new window is so slow compared to this.

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3Blue1Brown merged my PR a few days ago, so we now have a reload() command available in Manim that we can leverage in our extension 🎉

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I've opened a follow-up PR on the Manim repo to make it better by reloading all user-defined modules (was limited beforehand).