IDLE currently ignores the indent width setting in the main shell window, and forces it to use tab characters, 8 spaces wide. This is ugly, and causes problems when you write code in the shell and then cut-and-paste it into a real editor window. This patch adds an option (off by default) to honour the indent width setting in the PyShell window rather than using tabs. This makes it much nicer to edit commands that use several levels of indenting. The only reason for this to be an option, and for it to be off by default, is that it looks a little weird when the second line of code is indented, but still lines up with the first indented line because the prompt is also 4 characters wide. Fixing it so this would not look weird would be nice, but would require a lot of Tk hacking and might make the gui slower.
Logged In: YES user_id=764593 Would using a continuation prompt of " "*len(sys.ps1) solve the problem? (standard module) code uses a continuation prompt of "... " which gets the spacing right, though it doesn't do your indents for you.
Logged In: YES user_id=39615 Hmm, I had only considered using a continuation of "...". Using spaces would make things look mostly right, and will have odd behaviour only when you cut-and-paste into an editor, since you will get an extra indentation level, but that won't cause errors and is easily fixed. Here is a new patch that implements it this way. I think doing it this way solves the problem well enough that the preference is not necessary. (Or both patches can be applied to get this behaviour and the preference.)
