[Idle-dev] /me waves

[Todd Rovito]

Katie and Guido,

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 7:34 AM, Katie Cunningham <katie.fulton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> "Up arrow moves cursor" has confused every Python developer I've put
>> IDLE in front of. It might be time to rethinking including it, or at
>> least letting us have options for the different behaviors. I would be
>> much more likely to open IDLE if it mimicked my shell more.
>
>
> I agree. I am probably to blame for the original behavior -- I am using the
> shell in Emacs a lot, where up arrow does what it does in IDLE, and you use
> Meta-P (I think, only my fingers know it :-) instead. But the shell behavior
> in a regular terminal window is probably more familiar at this point.
>
> We constrain the Tk text widget in various ways, so if we can do this Id say
> go for it.
As I mentioned earlier in the day issue 2704 had a almost ready to go
patch for Python 3.4:
http://bugs.python.org/issue2704

I made three minor changes to it and now I have a nice IDLE shell (as
Katie had described) that allows me to use the arrow keys and
Meta-P/Meta-N!!!!  In addition you can turn off the extension via the
options menu then use the arrow keys to move around the shell.  This
gives us the best of both worlds and is simply brilliant.  Roger Serwy
had done the heavy lifting with the original extension which was added
three years ago!  So far I have only tested on Mac OS X and with
Python 3.4 the more people we get to test the issue the higher
probability a Python core developers will make the commit.