[Idle-dev] Re: IDLE UI Suggestion

[Stephen M. Gava]

On Sat, 2002-08-03 at 03:33, unknown man wrote:
> 
> I saw from the IDLEfork Website That you are the person in charge of most 
> of the changes to IDLE and IDLEfork's UI. 

I'm the project manager, or coordinator, for idlefork only. As it is a
cooperative open-source development project I don't have any 'power' to
tell anyone to do anything (nor would I want it), I just happen to be
the one who's volunteered some time to try to keep the project on the
rails as well as do some hacking on it. As for idle itself, as part of
python it is completely up to Guido van Rossum what happens with it,
although he has indicated that many of the features we are currently
developing in idlefork may well make it into a future idle version.

> I have a few suggestions for
> IDLE UI. I'm Not submitting them to the feature request area because
> I've noticed that that is often ignored by the IDLEfork Developers.

If you're talking about idlefork feature requests, nothing there is
ignored, but feature requests that are not in the project's current
scope (see http://idlefork.sourceforge.net/tasks.php ) will only be
looked at in detail when we are much closer to being stable for the next
series of releases. Of course if someone wants to dontate the time to
work on some whole new area along with the idea for it, that may be a
different question.

> (I'm not blaming anybody for this because you only have five register
> developers right now.)  

Also don't forget that any developers listed on any sourceforge project
page are not necessarily all that active at all times.

> I have ranked them using a one star (*) to
> five star (*****) System. I hope you can quickly change #1 and have
> the BDFL approve it 

Sorry I don't know what BDFL is.

> because it not only causes the program to crash in
> some cases but it also scares some new python user's from using IDLE.
> 
> *****
> #1. The menu items that do not apply to the python shell window (These 
> should be pretty obvious) soul be disabled or removed for the python
> shell window. 

I'm pretty sure Kurt Kaiser has recently checked in some changes along
these lines, plus if I remember rightly I recently tracked some changes
from python idle cvs that were already to this effect. 

> **
> #2. If possible remove the standard Tk icon from the window and replace 
> it with one of the python icons. It would make IDLE look more
> official.  

This is purely a Tk issue, not even a python one let alone an idle or
idlefork one. The Tk toolkit (whether or not it is called from python)
_insists_ on using it's own 'Tk' window icon under windows. Maybe they
will change this in the soon to be released Tk 3.4, I don't know, you
could follow it up in the Tk newsgroups/mailing lists if you like. Not
that there is any such issue under linux or any of the other unix-like
platforms that Tk/python/idle/idlefork run on; it only affects windows.
I agree that it looks pretty ugly though.

> Thank you for your time.

No worries, thanks for you interest in idlefork. I will forward this
reply to your message to the idle-dev mailing list, since this is the
place where issues relating to idle and idlefork are discussed. If you
have any further suggestions and don't want to use the sourceforge
tracker I suggest you join the idle-dev list (
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev ) and post your ideas
there.

Regards,
Stephen M. Gava
-- 
Stephen M. Gava  <elguavas@users.sourceforge.net>
IDLEfork ( http://idlefork.sourceforge.net )  " just like IDLE, only
crunchy "