[Idle-dev] Startup Shell Functionality

[Kurt B. Kaiser]

Bruce Sherwood <bas@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
> --On Monday, July 16, 2001 12:20 PM -0400 Guido van Rossum
> <guido@digicool.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Agreed.
> >
> > All I want is that instead of the relatively braindead output window,
> > the execution output should go into a PyShell window.  This is what
> > TeachScheme does.
> >
> > TeachScheme completely resets the ouput window each time you run the
> > program; I prefer to keep the output from the old session around (like
> > your code does now), with some kind of separator, so you can compare.
>
> Sounds interesting. And encouraged to add to the wish list, it would be nice
> to have some keypress take me to the previous separator. This would be
> particularly useful when the output for a run is quite long.

Wow! 

OK, output into an interactive "shell" window which resets its environment with
each run, but which keeps the output of previous run(s) around with delimiting
separators.

I'd suggest that to avoid massive confusion by students, that in that part of
the buffer associated with previous runs the left margin be padded with a
character to let people know it belongs to a previous environment.

Something like, save the previous output, pad those parts not yet padded,
append a fairly strident separator, start the new shell, toss in this stuff,
then add the new output?

Are we keeping all the old sessions, or just the previous one?

Hmm, opening a new window will slow things down, I notice that idlefork reuses
the output window and it's much faster the second and subsequent runs. I wonder
if it's hard to reuse the "shell" window? And if we have to start a new one, we
should kill the previous one to avoid clutter and confusion.

Any suggestions on what key to use? Should there be a matching forward jump?

Is the "hit return to copy text to the end" function supposed to work,
i.e. does this buffer do everything a Python IDLE shell does?

Regards, KBK