[Idle-dev] Dealing with a few feature requests

[Douglas S. Blank]

Hi Tal,

On Thu, May 24, 2007 3:34 pm, Tal Einat said:
> A few requests that have come up, and I want to hear some comments on
> them:
>
> * Ctrl+Right behavior: It as been suggested that pressing Ctrl+Right
> should
> jump to the next word ending, instead of the next word beginning like it
> currently does. There is currently no way to get to the end of a word with
> the keyboard except to use the arrow keys repeatedly. It is also
> non-intuitive to some users.

That sounds fine to me.

> * Cursor color change: For changes to the cursor's color to take effect,
> IDLE must be restarted. This is a known issue with Tk's Text widget, so I
> don't see how we could work around this... Still, we could have a popup
> message appear after a change to the cursor color in the config dialog,
> informing the user of this. I've seen several bug reports on this already,
> and have heard by word of mouth that this has frustrated several more
> people.

The Tk people should fix that.

> * Tabbed pages - This is the #1 feature request right now. I know several
> people who don't use IDLE just because of the lack of tabbed pages. Is
> anyone willing to help me work on this? I have done initial work (creating
> a
> solid TabbedPages widget), what's left is mostly hacking IDLE's internals
> to
> use the TabbedPages widget instead of opening new windows.

This would be great. Especially if it could be configured to look like Dr.
Python (or many others) where the interpreter is in one pane, and the tab
windows were in the other. I would help with this.

Some other suggestions:

1) Make the default color syntax formatter default to python before saving
an unnamed buffer. Most people use IDLE for editing Python files, so that
seems reasonable. Of course, saving the file in another format would still
change the formatter.

2) Disable by default (or ask for confirmation on) Control+p. How many
times students accidentally press control+p rather than alt+p, and send
the last two hours of editing to the printer. A "select printer dialog"
could also prevent this mistake.

-Doug

> - Tal

-- 
Douglas S. Blank
Associate Professor, Bryn Mawr College
http://cs.brynmawr.edu/~dblank/
Office: 610 526 6501