[Idle-dev] /me waves (original) (raw)

Todd Rovito rovitotv at gmail.com
Fri Mar 22 21:21:17 CET 2013

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

It's what up arrow does in a terminal window when using shell or Python (with readline support enabled). The IDLE interactive session resembles this context more than it resembles an editable text window.

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:46 AM, Bruce Sherwood <BruceSherwood at ncsu.edu> wrote: Pardon my obtuseness, but I don't understand what the issue is concerning "up arrow moves cursor". The behavior of up arrow looks the same to me in IDLE, Eclipse, Word, and Notepad++, though I don't use Emacs. FYI....the issue about the arrow keys in IDLE shell is actually in the bug tracker and even has a patch. http://bugs.python.org/issue2704

I have not personally tested the patch but it was created by Roger Serwy which means their is a high probability it is a high quality patch. So if people want this functionality we should test it and provide feedback on the issue tracker. Now that Roger has commit privileges he can commit it once he knows that it has been tested by multiple people on multiple platforms. Note that Roger's patch is an extension which means it can be turned on or off based on people's preference.

This bug provides a great example many of the issues that IDLE has actually have a patch in the issue tracker but nobody has actually committed them for various reasons. In fact the issue above has been in the issue tracker since 2008! My hope is that the renewed interest in IDLE over the last few days can inspire several people to simply test these patches and provide feedback to the Python core developers to be committed then the issues can be put to bed.

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