[Python-Dev] [Idle-dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library

[Neil Hodgson]

Kurt B. Kaiser:

>> The tear off menus are ugly as well as being non-standard on all three
>> major platforms.
>
> Well, would you discard them? They can (occasionally) be useful.

   Yes, I would replace the menus with ones missing the tear line.
Most of the GUI toolkits experimented with tear-offs (Mac in late 80s,
GTK+ up until 2002) and dropped them or hid them in a rarely visited
API. The idea initially appeared reasonable ("I can have the Run and
Check commands available with a single click") but was found to be too
confusing in use.

   IDLE, because it uses a separate top-level window for each file and
shell suffers more than most applications. A menu is torn off from one
window and always applies to that window but shows no visual affinity
with that window: its window is not even activated when a menu command
acts on it.

   Neil