[Idle-dev] IDLE and Tk-Cocoa

[Kevin Walzer]

Hello IDLE developers,

Somewhat by accident I have taken on the project of patching IDLE to 
work with a version of Tk-Aqua (Mac OS X) that builds on top of the 
Cocoa frameworks, instead of the older Carbon frameworks. As you 
probably know, Apple has deprecated its older Carbon UI frameworks 
(legacy from the Classic MacOS) in favor of the NextSTEP-derived Cocoa 
frameworks, which get continued development, supports 64-bit, etc.

Tk-Aqua has been ported to run on top of Cocoa and this will be the 
standard on the Mac when Tk 8.6 (now in beta) is released, hopefully 
later this fall. I have been testing a version of Tk-Cocoa backported to 
Tk 8.5 with  IDLE/Python 2.6.2, all built as 64-bit on Mac OS X 10.5. 
Unfortunately, there are some differences in how Tk-Cocoa and Tk-Carbon 
handle some items, such as menus, and this requires some patching.

I have assembled some patches to address the basic menu layout issues here:

http://bugs.python.org/issue6075

These seem to return IDLE to its standard menu layout.

Unfortunately, I have run across another bug, which I've reported here:

http://bugs.python.org/issue6463

Basically, IDLE freezes when trying to cut/copy/paste text, and also in 
handling some other formatting, such as adjusting indents, with 
Tk-Cocoa. I cannot find any obvious reason for this.

If anyone on this list is a Mac developer and wants to investigate 
either of these bugs, Tk-Cocoa 8. 5 can be downloaded here:

http://github.com/das/tcltk/tree/de-carbon-8-5

Thank you,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com