[Idle-dev] Removing IDLE from the standard library

[Guilherme Polo]

2010/7/10 Kevin Walzer <kw at codebykevin.com>:
>
> 3. One issue that would greatly help IDLE would be to integrate the new
> themed ttk widgets--has this happened in Python 2.7 or 3.1?
>

I did that some two years ago, either on a separated branch or a
separated repo (don't remember right now). I believe it was mostly
just to show how IDLE would look like with it, but it was also
extended to use tabs instead of separated windows (except for shell
and edit windows, I think -- memory failing). Anyway, I don't think it
will be easy to repatch the current IDLE using this previous patch
(especially because there is only a single patch with all the changes)
but the visual result can be seen at the first screenshot here:
http://code.google.com/p/python-ttk/wiki/Screenshots.

Maybe what is actually important is providing better usability than
just giving a prettier UI, but this tends to involve discussion and
there isn't enough people interested on discussing it. Things like not
needing to save a file before running or making the help window
non-modal have been done and in my opinion both improve usability but
there isn't a huge interesting on having them. Maybe people don't care
about these things at all, or maybe the people that care don't even
know they can file a bug report.

So .. (finally) .. updating IDLE to use ttk widgets when available
might cause two things (as I see it): several new minor bugs and
consequently getting more involvement of the current developers on
improving the IDE; or, several new minor bugs followed by reverting to
the previous version. At this point I'm not sure that doing this
update is going to help IDLE.


-- 
-- Guilherme H. Polo Goncalves