[Idle-dev] Big change to IDLE Shell

[Mark Roseman]

> On May 17, 2021, at 10:22 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> 5) Tabbed edit windows (already in IdleX).
> 
> Tabbed windows, with not just editors on tabs, was one of my initial goals 11 years ago, along with using ttk widgets (done).  Other things, including a bit of opposition, keep intervening.  I will increment its priority.
> 
> After Roger Sewey, IdleX author, got the commit bit, at my suggestion, he fixed about 10 issues in a few months, and then disappeared and quit contributing.  To do tabbed windows, he must have made some preliminary changes that could have already been merged.  (Separate the editor window into a menu window and a frame.)  But no one else has yet dived into his tabbed window code to see if it is usable.  Mark Roseman also said he did the same but I have not seen his code either.
> 
> Part of the holdup is that the current class inheritance tree is wrong and needs to be refactored, without breaking things.


Is there interest in building something akin to https://tkdocs.com/images/idle_onewindow.png <https://tkdocs.com/images/idle_onewindow.png> into IDLE in the foreseeable future?

I’ve considered updating the code I did a while back (https://github.com/roseman/idle <https://github.com/roseman/idle>) but getting it from where it was to a series of patches that would actually find it’s way into IDLE I thought would be challenging due to multiple steps needed.

As you say, restructuring things so that editors, shells, debuggers etc. are assumed to fit in frames and not be their own toplevel was a starting point (e.g., I introduced a generic ‘Component’ class).

And to be honest, how to determine what is considered an “acceptable" UI change for IDLE remains wholly opaque to me. There are still many things in there that leave me scratching my head.

Some things would be simplified now (e.g., at that point ttk wasn’t assumed) but I’m still not confident about reworking that, with proper testing, etc. to the point that it would be accepted into the main codebase.

Mark

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