[Idle-dev] The '>>> ' prompt is bad

[Alan Gauld]

On 14/06/12 22:38, Terry Reedy wrote:

>> Doing what the standard interpreter does
>
> The standard interpreter on Windows puts fixed-pixel width prompts (not
> so important, but not completely unimportant either) in a separate
> fixed-width column (critical) to the left

I'm not sure wyhat you mean. The standard prompt I meant was the vanilla 
interpreter whivch, onm Windows, runs in a terminal window(aka DOS box) 
and has the usual >>> and ... prompts.

Are you referring to the Pythonwin GUI or something else?

> The question is whether this is possible with tk.

Sure just add a (read only) text box down the side of the editing pane. 
But its a bit of a pig keeping the prompt in the right position wrt the 
editing pane.

>  >>> and consequently the first indent may not look like an indent.
> Indeed, with Lucida Sans Unicode, '...     ' is *shorter* than '>>> ',
> so that the first indent is visually a dedent! This is not acceptible.

But better than the current situation with no secondary prompt - at 
least you can see that there is some kind of indent wrt the prompt.

But in Python anyone who uses non mono-spaced fonts for coding is asking 
for trouble IMHO!

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/