[Python-Dev] IDLE in the stdlib (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Thu Mar 21 12:19:09 CET 2013

On 3/21/2013 5:20 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

Le Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:42:33 -0400, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> a écrit :

On 3/20/2013 11:54 PM, Eli Bendersky wrote:

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 8:32 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu

Ugly is subjective: by what standard and compared to what?

Compared to other existing Python IDEs and shells which are layered on top of modern GUI toolkits that are actively developed to keep with modern standards, unlike Tk which is frozen in the 1990s. I think being frozen in the late 1990s is better than being frozen in the early 1980s, like Command Prompt is. In fact, I think we should 'deprecate' the Command Prompt interpreter as the standard interactive interpreter and finish polishing and de-glitching IDLE's Python Shell, which runs on top of the windowless version of CP with a true GUI. And this may indeed be reasonable under Windows, where the command-line is a PITA!

Which is the only context I was talking about.

But the Linux command-line is actually quite very usable these days, especially if you configure your Python interpreter to use readline for tab-completion of identifiers (which should be done by default, see http://bugs.python.org/issue5845).

IDLE has tab-completion for both identifiers and attributes, in both shell and editor windows. It is probably under-documented; I am still learning to use it effectively. I am curious if the readline version works better in any way that IDLE could imitate.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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