[Idle-dev] IDLE and ttk

[Mark Roseman]

A quick followup to my own post (had problems posting to the mailing list, now fixed)… in the interim have had a brief interchange with Terry on the topic; he reassured me now is probably a good time to try to do this work and get it integrated in.

As Terry pointed out to me, the bulk of the core functionality in IDLE is actually modifications to the text widget, which wouldn't change.

When it comes to cross-platform apps, there is always a tension between making things consistent with the platform you're running on, vs. making things consistent for those moving between platforms. 

Given that most advanced Python developers use other tools most of the time, the consensus seems to be that IDLE is most used by (a) people, often non-programmers, being exposed to or learning about Python, and only very secondarily (b) Python developers who might fire up IDLE when moving their existing code to another platform.

This does suggest to me that making IDLE as unobtrusive as possible (i.e. emphasizing fitting in with platform expectations) would be more important, so new learners can focus on Python. As long as the overall structure of the user interface doesn't change between platforms, most experienced developers will be able to accomplish what they need on a new box. 

So the main goal would be making IDLE look and feel, to a far greater extent than currently, like it just fits in. A secondary goal would be to make future improvements and maintenance to IDLE easier (which several of the types of changes I'm proposing would address). Everything would be tested on recent versions of Mac, Windows and Linux, and I anticipate backporting to 2.7 as well. 

I'll hold off on bringing up any specifics at this time, as I'm sure everyone has their favorite bugaboo (many of which made it into the bug database), but I'm looking for any initial comments to the general idea.