[Pythonmac-SIG] FAQ item

[Kevin Altis]

> From: Jack Jansen
>
> On dinsdag, jul 29, 2003, at 19:06 Europe/Amsterdam, Skip Montanaro
> wrote:
>
> >
> >     Israel> I would love for the PythonIDE to have Syntax coloring..
> >
> > So submit a patch. ;-)
>
> Just a warning that people probably shouldn't spend too much time on
> the current IDE:
> we should consider it at the end of its useful life. The W toolkit on
> which it
> is built predates even Appearance Manager, and it's design has resisted
> any
> attempt to make it appearance-mgr compatible. Moreover, nowadays we
> have Cocoa,
> which would do a lot of things automatically, and there are lots
> of all-singing-all-dancing edit widgets and other things available that
> we could
> put to good use.
>
> Some time next week I'd like to start a discussion on what people would
> like
> to see for the future, and what they're willing to help with.
> Cocoa-ification
> of IDE and Package Manager is going to be topmost on my list, that
> much I know:-)

I realize that the focus will in general be on Cocoa for the UI, but
whenever possible the underlying mechanisms should probably not be
Mac-specific unless everyone simply feels like reinventing the wheel and
doesn't want to leverage the work going on with other platforms.

This is especially true of the Package Manager, which Python desperately
needs on all platforms. The PM is related to the larger problem of a
CPAN-like repository for Python. PyPI starts to solve the directory problem
and FreePAN might be a mechanism for distribution including mirroring. It is
nice that the PM is getting so much attention, but it will help the Python
community as a whole if the underlying mechanisms used can be applied to
Linux, Windows, etc. later.

Neil Hodgson has said that someone is working on a Cocoa port of Scintilla.
People on this list might want to contact Neil to help push that forward so
that Scintilla would be available from PyObjC and give editor/IDE authors a
very fast and capable text editing engine. You can use it via wxPython today
as the wxStyledTextCtrl, but the library still has some quirks on Mac OS X.
Anyway, a native port would give you a great deal of capabilities for free
rather than having to code them up from scratch.

ka