[Pythonmac-SIG] What about the Tcl/Tk problems?

[Just van Rossum]

At 11:19 AM +0100 16-02-2000, Peter Funk wrote:
>Hi!
>
>Guido posted an official annoucement about IDLE 0.5 to 'comp.lang.python'.
>He wrote:
>[...]
>> IDLE has the following features:
>>
>> - coded in 100% pure Python, using the Tkinter GUI toolkit (i.e. Tcl/Tk)
>>
>> - cross-platform: works on Windows and Unix (on the Mac, there are
>>   currently problems with Tcl/Tk)
>
>Anybody aware of what Guido ment here?
>The path related problems discussed in this SIG in November/December?
>I've no Mac here at the moment, so I can't check now, whether IDLE
>will run with the <ftp://ftp.cwi.nl/pub/jack/python/mac/Python152.bin>
>version, after the paths have been manually fixed.
>
>But I'm interested to have a working Python/Tcl/Tk combo available for
>the Mac until April.  I'm sure, that I can convince my company to spend
>some money and effort on this, if this could help to get this working.

I think the main problem is that the Tcl/Tk version shipped with MacPython
is too old. Neither Jack nor I have the time to fix this (which is also due
to the fact that *we* don't use it...), so if you could help here, that
would be Great!

The last time I tried to run Idle (which was closer to version 0.4 than to
0.5 at the time) I could easily get it to run by uncommenting one line in
Idle, but it still sucked: even the most standard shortcuts (like
copy/paste, etc.) were not Mac-like: they used the control key instead of
the command key. I don't know if this is Idle's problem or Tk's problem,
though. And then there's the fact that the Tk version shipped with
MacPython looks very clumsy, and seems to be very unstable. But: I hardly
know anything about the Tcl/Tk internals, so I can't help at all. Jack
knows quite a bit more, but still, I'm afraid you'd be largely on your own
:-(.

Just