[Idle-dev] Re: IDLE plans

[Mike Romberg]

> NITS

> We'd like to make IDLE's Emacs emulation more like Emacs (see TODO.txt
> again).  We could use some help in coding this up, and also could use
> some suggestions about what are the most sorely needed Emacsisms.  (We
> already know about paren matching. :-)

  The one emacs emulation kind of thing that I think would be really
useful and more important than just cosmetic stuff is to provide hooks
into the guts of idle the same way emacs does.  Emacs can be extended
and customized very easily because most modes provide these
(documented) hooks.

  The group I am working with uses an embeded python to customize our
application.  We allow our users to write small python functions to
perform manipulations on various weather elements.  This works great
and our users (national weather service forecasters) really like the
power and flexibility.

  When they edit this python code, we fire up idle (not as a separate
process but in our same interpreter).  The problem is that we had to
override some of the default menu items (like close/exit).  We did not
want our whole application to stop when the idle window was shut
down.  In addition we wished to take some additional actions after the
code was edited.  We were able to do this by examining the current
idle code and overriding some of the call backs.  But this is kinda
ugly.  It would be much nicer if IDLE had some hooks to do these kind
of things.  Since IDLE is still in its early stages, perhaps this
would be a good time to start doing this kind of thing.  I think an
emacs like editor which uses python instead of lisp would be much
easier to deal with for most users.

Mike Romberg (romberg@fsl.noaa.gov)