[Python-Dev] [Idle-dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library (original) (raw)

Neil Hodgson nyamatongwe at gmail.com
Tue Jul 13 01:37:32 CEST 2010

Kurt B. Kaiser:

The tear off menus are ugly as well as being non-standard on all three major platforms. Well, would you discard them? They can (occasionally) be useful.

Yes, I would replace the menus with ones missing the tear line. Most of the GUI toolkits experimented with tear-offs (Mac in late 80s, GTK+ up until 2002) and dropped them or hid them in a rarely visited API. The idea initially appeared reasonable ("I can have the Run and Check commands available with a single click") but was found to be too confusing in use.

IDLE, because it uses a separate top-level window for each file and shell suffers more than most applications. A menu is torn off from one window and always applies to that window but shows no visual affinity with that window: its window is not even activated when a menu command acts on it.

Neil

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