[Idle-dev] Looking over someone's shoulder

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

During my stay in the US I've been teaching some people Python, but
sadly I'm in the Netherlands again and it is hard to continue their
education without my ability to look over their shoulders.

It would therefore be very nice if IDLE had somekind of facility to
connect to some other IDLE elsewhere on the net, and synchronize the
contents of a window with it. I don't much care if they're constant
updates or if some 'send' button needs to be pressed; perhaps both
options could be supplied. 

This way I can look over the shoulders of students while they're experimenting
with Python code, even though said students are in the US and I'm in Europe.
It would be even nicer if I could go in and change their code for them. 

This feature may also be useful if you want to share code snippets
with others on the net.

I haven't seen other IDEs which can do this, but I think things like
this could be nice to have in a real life course setting as well. It might be
a nice way to monitor the progress of students (who are sitting behind
PCs) from a central location.

Generalized, perhaps settings somewhat like this:

username password domain          access 
faassen  foobar   vet.uu.nl       read/write 
guido    barfoo   python.org      read 
timbot   PSU      anywhere        read/write

I'm not sure if this sharing should be on file basis, project basis or
window basis, but you all hopefully get the general idea.

Regards,

Martijn