[Idle-dev] hi, newbie questions

[phil jones]

Hi everyone,

I just joined the list and wanted to say hello.

My name's phil jones and I've been writing in Python for about 3 years
and am still looking for the right editor / development environment
for me to work with Python. I use IDLE about half the time I write
Python. There are things I like about it and things that drive me
crazy. Sometimes I dream about writing an IDE of my own or
contributing to, or adapting an existing one. So I figured I should
join the list.

I have several questions :

1) the first is obviously, what's going on with IDLE? Couldn't find
much documentation or discussion about it on the web (in terms of
documentation or tutorials for people coding it), nor does it seem to
have changed much over the last couple of releases of Python. How is
it considered? An acceptable editor to get started, but serious Python
programmers graduate to a "real IDE" (if so, which one?). The main
*free* Python development environment? Or something which people here
are planning to grow much further? How many people are actively
involved in IDLE development at the moment?

2) The main thing that drives me crazy with IDLE and makes it pretty
much unusuable for me is this. I like to develop with two files open,
one with the code I'm working on and a second with unit tests.
Obviously the unit-test file is the one I want to run and I import the
other file into it. It seems like IDLE only does this import once, so
that if I run the unit test, find a bug, fix the bug in the other file
and re-run the unit tests (by hitting F5), IDLE doesn't notice that
the code changed. So I then have to execute my program from the
windows command line instead of hitting F5.

Is this really how IDLE behaves? Or am I just doing something wrong /
stpid and there's a way to get the behavior I want in IDLE?

3) One of the things I like about IDLE is that it's in Tk and standard
in the Python distro, so you can be sure it's there. I've been
developing a program with an editor-like GUI and I decided to use Tk /
Tix rather than something based on another GUI layer, because of this.
I thought I might be able to re-use bits of IDLE for it, and even
contribute some stuff back to IDLE. However, when I upgraded to Python
2.5 my code just stopped working - with an error message saying that
Python can't find and include Tix. Anyone know what's up with that? I
thought Tix was part of standard Python? Did it break? Did IDLE also
have problems with the upgrade to 2.5?

4) I'm guess I'm also looking for people here who know what's going on
in with Tk, Tix and Tkinter. Tk is pretty basic, is it still being
developed? Is there any work going on on Tix or any Python GUI
frameworks which sit on top of Tk?

Obviously there's GTk and wxPython and the OS native libraries which
seem to be prefered by most Python projects. But I'm really interested
in the "batteries-included" story for Python.

cheers

phil jones

http://www.synaesmedia.net