How do you configure IDLE on a Mac, seeing as there's no Configure Option...

[Ned Deily]

In article 
<ec96e1391001040805j13b4e5cet3f1b74e9a81ed5c5 at mail.gmail.com>,
 Benjamin Kaplan <benjamin.kaplan at case.edu> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 8:42 PM, Mensanator <mensanator at aol.com> wrote:
> > ...because there's no [Options] menu on the shell window?
> >
> > Or at least give me a clue to how to use Courier New font?
> >
> > For some inscrutable reason, depite the plethora of formatting tools,
> > someone decided that proportional spaced fonts ought to be the
> > default for IDLE.
> Mac Applications don't have "options" menus. They have a "preferences"
> pane which is the second item in the application menu (the one that
> takes the name of the active program) and has a keyboard shortcut of
> Cmd-,
> 
> Apple's user-interface guidelines are pretty specific, so you'll find
> that this works for all native OS X (i.e. not X11) applications.

But be aware that IDLE on OS X has had various problems with missing 
and/or duplicate menu items.  IIRC, the current python.org OS X IDLEs 
(2.6.4 and 3.1.1) should be OK and you can modify the font via the 
Preferences menu (and currently changed preferences apply to all 
versions of IDLE).  Note also that there are two different ways to 
launch the OS X IDLE.  python.org installers put a double-clickable 
IDLE.app in /Applications/Python n.x.  There is also a command-line 
"idlen.n" in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/n.n/bin 
which, optionally, has a symlink from /usr/local/bin.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org