[Idle-dev] Problem with the French keyboard on IDLE 3.2.2

[Ned Deily]

In article <67F073B8-298D-474E-8E0A-D0A58D18031E at unice.fr>,
 Jean-Paul Roy <Jean-Paul.Roy at unice.fr> wrote:
> I am starting an undergraduate course on Python 3.2.2 and I would like to use 
> the IDLE IDE on Mac Lion, as IDLE is actually cool for teaching. BUT I have 
> problems with some dead keys, for example to get the tilde char, by the 
> sequence "Alt-n <space>", the "Alt-n" moves the cursor on top of buffer 
> instead of displaying the ~ char ! The french input method seems to be 
> ignored which is strange in the Unicode times. I looked without success in 
> the Preferences/Key menu. Same for french circumflex e (ê) impossible to get 
> with the keyboard, etc.
> IDLE is hardly usable with such behavior. It is strange that this bug seems 
> to be known for months but no remedy comes from the Python community :-( I 
> have not this problem with other IDE which are alas a bit too complex for 
> beginners (we wish the same IDE for all OS).
> The course (250 students) will start in sept. 2012. 

See the discussion here:

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.general/703430

Unfortunately, the problem is due to lack of support of Mac OS X input 
methods in the OS X versions of Tk.  It needs to be fixed there but, as 
far as I know, it is not being worked on by anyone in the Tcl/Tk world.  
There is nothing that Python or IDLE can do to work around it.  Perhaps 
you can add your support on the Tk bug tracker here:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=12997&atid=112997

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org