[Idle-dev] IDLE shell: Moving prompts to a side-bar

[Tal Einat]

Thanks for expressing your opinions on this, Guido, André and Jeremy, and
I'm happy that you all are in support!

On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 6:58 AM Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

>
> In issue 37903, RH appears to be requiring support for doctests.
> (Interestingly, in issue 7676 he wishes the IDLE shell wouldn't use tabs,
> which you're going to support.) I'm a little confused by his comments about
> doctests. IMO copying from a "doctest" in the docs to the shell is not
> affected -- the problem there is purely that you have to work hard to avoid
> also copying the ">>>" and (especially) "..." prompts into the shell. That
> seems to me to be the main thing people would do with doctests, and it's
> unaffected. It's true that recreating a doctest from an IDLE shell session
> is a little harder -- but a nice fallback is to use the python binary
> itself, which has the exact behavior you'd want. So I don't see this as a
> reason not to backport. (This also seems pretty niche. I don't know if he
> can back up his claim that doctests have become more popular.)
>

My reading of Raymond's comment related to doctests was also that he was
worried about losing the ability to create doctests simply by copy/pasting
from an IDLE shell session. ISTM that moving the prompts to a side-bar
would make it only slightly more difficult, though perhaps significantly
difficult for novices. If this becomes a common request we could simply add
a "copy for doctest" context menu option - I'd be happy to implement that
myself.

- Tal
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