[Idle-dev] open idle edit window only?

[Tal Einat]

On 7/20/07, Douglas S. Blank <dblank at brynmawr.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, July 20, 2007 1:48 pm, Paul Guse said:
> > Is there a way to open just the edit window (without the run window) from
> > the commandline?
> > I can go into the idle configuration and change the "At Startup" option to
> > "Open Edit Window" and this does what I'm looking for, but I need to be
> > able to do this without manually going into idle and changing it.
> > I need to be able to control this through the commandline (or equivalent)
> > without making the user set up the options manually.
>
> I don't know how to do what you ask, but I will second the motion that
> this is an annoyance. It seems that there should be a third option that
> would open the edit window, given a file to edit, or open the interpreter
> otherwise. Of course, this is moot if we had the ability to have a single
> window that was split with editor and interpreter.

Your "third option" would seem to be the obvious default behavior, IMO.

I've always wondered at the editor/shell window logic in IDLE. I would
expect IDLE to open a shell window if called without arguments, or an
editor window if called with one or more arguments. A flag to
specifically also open a shell window would suffice to allow opening a
shell window alongside editor window(s). But the config option for
choosing what should be opened initially, which cannot be overridden
from the command line, seems silly. (Especially since opening a
shell/editor window is a very simple action.)

I think we should remove this config option from IDLE and make the
command line options simpler and more intuitive/standard. I feel this
would go well with IDLE's philosophy of being as simple as possible,
avoiding clutter as much as possible. Just as we avoid excessive GUI
elements, we should avoid excessive configuration options.

Any feedback on this would be welcome!

- Tal