[Tutor] Non-escaped utf-8 rendering in the interactive shell under XP?

[Patrick Hall]

Hi folks,

Being a Linux guy, I don't know my way around Windows software too
well. I've been trying to help some friends learn a bit of Python, and
they use OSX and XP.

OSX is close enough to Linux that I've not run into many barriers, but
I'm having a specific problem with the XP users:

Is there an IDE out there that supports Unicode (utf-8) text? 

I've set sitecustomize.py to 'utf-8', such that
sys.getdefaultencoding() will return 'utf-8', and everything seems to
be working ok interms of reading, writing, and processing data in
utf-8. The problem is that the text itself is escaped in the
interactive shell, rather than being rendered. It's not a font thing,
since if they write out the data to a file and open it in a browser,
the text is readable.

The Gnome terminal under Linux seems to do this fine once I've made
that change in sitecustomize.py, and OSX seems to behave similarly.

I've suggested my friends try SciTE, Idle, and Activestate's
PythonWin, and as far as I can tell none of these IDEs solve the
problem.

The people I'm trying aren't going to be interested in wading into
something like any flavor of Emacs or vim. After all, they want to
learn Python because it's friendly, and those editors are great, but
they're not friendly.

Am I missing any options or misunderstanding any of these IDEs? 

Thanks kindly,
Patrick