IDLE (original) (raw)

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Integrated development environment for Python

IDLE
IDLE in action under Ubuntu: shell with highlights settings
Original author Guido van Rossum
Initial release December 22, 1998; 26 years ago (1998-12-22)
Stable release 3.12.9 Edit this on Wikidata / 4 February 2025; 8 months ago (4 February 2025)
Repository github.com/python/cpython/tree/master/Lib/idlelib Edit this at Wikidata
Written in Python
Type Integrated development environment
Website docs.python.org/library/idle.html

IDLE (short for Integrated Development and Learning Environment)[1][2] is an integrated development environment for Python, which has been bundled with the default implementation of the language since 1.5.2b1.[3][4] It is packaged as an optional part of the Python packaging with many Linux distributions. It is completely written in Python and the Tkinter GUI toolkit (wrapper functions for Tcl/Tk).

IDLE is intended to be a simple IDE and suitable for beginners,[_citation needed_] especially in an educational environment. To that end, it is cross-platform[5], and avoids feature clutter.

According to the included README and the online IDLE documentation[6], its main features are:

Author Guido van Rossum says IDLE stands for "Integrated Development and Learning Environment",[6] and since Van Rossum named the language Python after the British comedy group Monty Python, the name IDLE was probably also chosen partly to honor Eric Idle, one of Monty Python's founding members.[7][8]

  1. ^ From the Help > About screen
  2. ^ "IDLE — Python 3.9.5 documentation". Archived from the original on 2020-06-04. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  3. ^ Van Rossum, Guido (16 Nov 1998). "IDLE 0.1 -- a Python IDE". comp.lang.python. Archived from the original on 2018-09-25 – via Linux Weekly News. At the conference I mentioned a few times that I was working on a Tkinter-based IDE for Python. I've decided to use the paradigm "release early and often" for this piece of software (especially since I don't expect I'll have much time to work on it), so version 0.1 (essentially a dump of my directory) is now sitting in the contrib directory ftp.python.org.
  4. ^ IDLE 0.1 was distributed with the Python 1.5.2b1 release on 12/22/98., From: \Python-1.5.2\Tools\idle\NEWS.txt
  5. ^ "IDLE documentation quote". docs.python.org. Archived from the original on 3 October 2025. Retrieved 3 October 2025. cross-platform: works mostly the same on Windows, Unix, and macOS
  6. ^ a b "IDLE — Python 3.9.2 documentation". docs.python.org. Retrieved 2021-02-26.
  7. ^ Lutz, Mark & Ascher, David (2004). Learning Python, p. 40. O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 978-0-596-00281-7.
  8. ^ Hammond, Mark; Robinson, Andy (2000). Python programming on Win32 (1. ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 59. ISBN 978-1-56592-621-9.