idlerc.py

[Randall Hopper]

Bernhard Herzog:
 |Randall Hopper <aa8vb at yahoo.com> writes:
 |> Warren Postma:
 |>  |> Now is there a way to put these color settings in an ".idlerc" of sorts so
 |>  |> they're kept from version to version without hacking any source?
 |>  |
 |>  |How about checking your working (and home directory for unix} for an
 |>  |"idlerc.py" on Unix and if so, run it.
 |> 
 |> Sounds good, but IDLE doesn't support it.
 |
 |Don't forget the time machine! It's a little known and perhaps
 |undocumented feature of Tkinter that it tries to execute a coule of
 |files in the user's home directory on startup. See the readprofile
 |method of the Tk class in Tkinter.py. 

That's good to know!  I've not seen that in print before.  (Fredrik, I see
this isn't mentioned in the latest draft.  I think it's definitely worth a
mention)

 |In IDLE'S case, one of the files is ~/.idle.py.
 |
 |I don't use IDLE myself, but I just tried it with the version that comes
 |with 1.5.2 and it works.

It didn't work for me.  No matter whether I invoke "idle.py" directly or
run "python idle.py", it didn't touch ~/.idle.py (I know because I put a
print and a sys.exit in there).

Under the hood, baseName and className (args to Tk() are left to their
defaults.  sys.argv[0] is empty (?).  And the reason is that IDLE is
hacking up sys.argv for some reason when -e isn't specified, which prevents
baseName from being set, which causes Tkinter to look for these files:

   /home/rhh/.Tk.tcl /home/rhh/.Tk.py /home/rhh/..tcl /home/rhh/..py

and which therefore prevents .idle.py from being read by Tkinter.

Seeing this, I verified that IDLE does indeed read ~/.idle.py when invoked
as "idle.py -e".

This appears to be a bug.  If there are no objections after a while, I'll
go ahead and file it.

 |On potential problem is that this happens very early on and important
 |parts of IDLE might not be initialized yet. In Sketch at least this
 |feature is practically worthless because of that.

I see.  

IDLE as-is doesn't appear to be coded to allow an override of class
ColorPrefs by Tkinter.

I'd code up a quick patch, but I can't figure where in the world the
symbols defined in ~/.idle.py are getting placed ! (From Tkinter.py, it
looks like they should be in _default_root, but apparently not...)

-- 
Randall Hopper
aa8vb at yahoo.com