[Idle-dev] Intentions?

[Guido van Rossum]

> I have a feature request related to this. I'm on Win98 and I've set up an
> association between .py files and IDLE, so that I can right click on a .py
> file and select "Edit in IDLE" from the popup menu. When I select that
> option, I get two open windows for every file that I open this way: a shell
> window and a file window. When I open three or four files this way it
> results in an awful lot of open shell windows, none of which I need in this
> case - I just want to edit the file and get out. So maybe an option that I
> could add to my IDLE laucher that would only open the file, and not a shell,
> would help. Here is what I use now. Maybe it could be improved and I just
> don't know how:
> 
> C:\Python21\pythonw.exe C:\Python21\Tools\idle\idle.pyw -e "%1" %*

Idlefork has this much more reasonable behavior:

    idle.py file

opens an editing window on file and nothing else.

But there's another thing I'd like to see: if you open several files
this way, they all end up running separate copies of IDLE.  A little
bit of Windows-specific magic should be added to make this attach to
an already-running IDLE copy.  But I don't know how to do that yet. :-)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)