[Idle-dev] A satisfied user

[Martijn Faassen]

Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> I've been using Dave Scherer's new version of IDLE, and I really like it.

I just tried it and I agree it's nicer to work with than before, because
now I don't have to think about anything and just press F5. It comes
close to what Emacs Python-mode does.

One thing I've noticed is that when you manually close the output window
(under X) the program keeps running anyway. I think the system should
close the program down in that case, which is what I expected. Now I had
two programs running, one printing all integers up to infinity, and
another saving those integers to a file, and I'm not sure if there is
any way to close them under those circumstances.

Also I wonder why the current working directory is set to /var/tmp (I 
don't know if this is new or was already a feature of IDLE). It's not the
directory I tend to go look in. It's hard to say what IDLE should do
under Linux anyway, though. Ah, I notice that when you actually open
a file in another directory, the working directory changes to that. Cool!

What I'd still like to do is open a file that doesn't exist yet, creating
it. At the moment I can't do "And there shall be a module, and I will name
thee foo.py", which is a bit frustrating.

> To me the most important aspect is that its interactivity for whole
> programs is very close to what  the interactive interpreter provides for
> single statements. I'll interject that as a Python novice I'm uncomfortable
> using the interactive interpreter because I want to be able to work
> incrementally, including correcting rather than re-creating statements in
> the face of expected incorrect syntax. For a novice I believe it is
> typically more appropriate to be working on and revising a program rather
> than typing single lines. And beyond the novice level, it is really nice to
> have high interactivity.

I agree. I think I'll adopt this version for my Python class. :)

Regards,

Martijn