[Idle-dev] IDLE shortcut on Windows XP (was<Tutor> Re: XP and python 2.4, some progress)

Jim Sizelove sizelji at insightbb.com
Tue Jan 11 15:41:15 CET 2005


Jeffrey Thomas Peery wrote:
> I wasn’t able to get the IDLE started in windows XP. I had it working 
> then I upgraded to 2.4, then it didn’t work so I switched back to 2.3, 
> still didn’t work so I’m back to 2.4.  I did some looking around and I 
> was able to get the IDLE started by setting the shortcut on my desktop to:
> 
>  
> 
> *C:\Python24\python.exe C:\Python24\Lib\idlelib\idle.pyw –n*
> 
>  
> 
> Not sure what this does. But is seems to get it going. What is going on 
> here? Also I get a console that appears with this message - I have no 
> idea what it means:
> 
>  
> 
> *Warning: configHandler.py – IdleConf.GetThemeDict – problem retrieving 
> theme element ‘builtin-background’*
> 
> *For theme ‘Jeff’*
> 
> *Returning default value: ‘#ffffff’*
> 
>  
> 
> Anyhow if anyone can explain what is going on here I would appreciate 
> the help… and is there anyway to get the IDLE icon in my windows start 
> menu to work?
> 
> Ok thanks for the help!
> 
>  
> 
> Jeff
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor

I had a similar problem when I installed ActivePython 2.4 on my Windows 
XP notebook.  ActiveState does not include a shortcut to IDLE, but when 
I right-click on any file ending with .py, "Edit with IDLE" is one of 
the menu items.  This menu item did not work.

After much looking around and trying different things, I eventually made 
a slight change to the PY extension in Folder Options/File Types.  The 
command for the "Edit with IDLE" action looked like this:

"C:\Python24\pythonw.exe" "C:\Python24\Lib\idlelib\idle.pyw"-n -e "%1" %*

There was no space between the "idle.pyw" and the "-n".  Once I inserted 
  a space, the shortcut menu item worked great.  I wonder if the space 
is also missing in the shortcut for IDLE in the Python 2.4 from 
python.org.  Does someone using the standard python 2.4 distribution on 
Windows XP want to check this out?

Jim Sizelove



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