[Idle-dev] editor experiments

[StephenM.Gava]

> On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 12:33:54AM -0400, Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> > I repeat that the shell should be available to those who find it useful.
> > But I also emphasize that if you have only had the shell and a clunky
> > batch-style environment to compare and contrast, don't underestimate the
> > possibilities of doing exploration in a truly interactive editor window.

I don't think exploration in a truly interactive editor window has been 
underestimated here at all, I think its a granted that that is a great thing 
to have!  I think the interactive mode of the python interpreter has been 
underestimated. :)  But in any case, yes, there should be both, and they 
should be as easy as possible to use together.

> Certainly, a Smalltalk-like editor contextual menu where you could
> select a code fragment and "print it" or "inspect it" - spawning a new
> window in context - would make a lot of sense.  That's what I use the
> shell for 99% of the time, anyway... but trying to import modules in
> the shell and interact with them is really painful, especially when
> you're changing the modules in question.  That's why the single-key
> run of VPython's IDLE was really nice - you could create a new file
> when you wanted to experiment, make some changes, hit the run key, and
> see the output.  I especially liked the way only the new output was
> visible, but the older output was also there if you wanted to scroll
> up.

I agree Nicholas. This mode of operation is already available in idle-fork, 
which was based on VPython's IDLE and which we are currently merging recent 
improvements in python-idle back to. We have no plan to take this extra 
functionality away from idle-fork, rather we plan only to add even more 
improvements to this feature and the rest of idle-fork. We have some rather 
ambitious plans but we should at least be able to make both of these camps 
(shell and editor lovers) happy, plus hopefully a lot more.

> For a long time I've wanted to write an Inspector (again, like in
> Smalltalk) for Python data types and objects - it'd certainly be
> possible to write one with Tkinter and incorporate it into IDLE.  Only
> reason I haven't is that I no longer use Python very much where I am
> now.

Sounds like you could make some worthy contributions again if you have the 
time and the inclination in the future! This reminds me, when I began 
re-starting idlefork a couple of weeks ago I got in contact with all the folk 
who had previously been developers on it to see if they wished to carry on in 
any capacity under "son of idlefork". I thought I had emailed you about this 
but checking back over my messages I can't find one sent to you so I may have 
forgotten to do that. Would you like to stay on as a developer (regular 
commiter) under the revamped project, or would you like to revert to being an 
occasional commiter via patches until some future time when you may have more 
time for idlefork again? Either way I don't mind, I'm happy to leave you on 
as a developer in case you intend to use that access at some stage, as I have 
with a couple of others.

Cheers,
Stephen.
-- 
Stephen M. Gava
<elguavas@users.sourceforge.net>
"More power to those who don't care for it." - anon