[Idle-dev] IDLE and ttk

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/28/2015 2:28 PM, Mark Roseman wrote:

> 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.

There are no ttk (themed tk) versions of Tk, Toplevel, Menu, Text, or 
Canvas.  The only change to Shell/Editor/OutputWindow would be the 
scrollbars, to make them better match the platform standard.

> 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.

After looking at the side-by-side examples on your site, this is no 
longer a worry for me.  We already, by necessity, customize the menus 
and keybindings for Mac, and users can further customized keybindings, 
fonts, and text colors (and other things). I would want styles and 
themes set up so users can select among those available (mac theme on 
windows?) and add their own customized versions.

> So the main goal would be making IDLE look and feel, to a far greater
> extent than currently, like it just fits in.

As the default, I think this would be fine.

> 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.

This is the important part for me, and it *will* impact others.

> 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.

There will be multiple tracker issues for this project, and if there is 
interest here, I will announce them here for people who do not follow 
new issues on the tracker.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy