[Idle-dev] The '>>> ' prompt is bad

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/16/2012 7:11 AM, Alan Gauld wrote:
> On 14/06/12 22:38, Terry Reedy wrote:
>
>>> Doing what the standard interpreter does
>>
>> The standard interpreter on Windows puts fixed-pixel width prompts (not
>> so important, but not completely unimportant either) in a separate
>> fixed-width column (critical) to the left
>
> I'm not sure wyhat you mean. The standard prompt I meant was the vanilla
> interpreter whivch, onm Windows, runs in a terminal window(aka DOS box)
> and has the usual >>> and ... prompts.

That is exactly what I mean. The first four *fixed width* characters are 
off limits to the user.

> Are you referring to the Pythonwin GUI or something else?
>
>> The question is whether this is possible with tk.
>
> Sure just add a (read only) text box down the side of the editing pane.
> But its a bit of a pig keeping the prompt in the right position wrt the
> editing pane.

>>  >>> and consequently the first indent may not look like an indent.
>> Indeed, with Lucida Sans Unicode, '...     ' is *shorter* than '>>> ',
>> so that the first indent is visually a dedent! This is not acceptible.
>
> But better than the current situation with no secondary prompt - at
> least you can see that there is some kind of indent wrt the prompt.

I consider having the first indented line start to the *left* of the 
unindented line above to be worse than the current situation.

> But in Python anyone who uses non mono-spaced fonts for coding is asking
> for trouble IMHO!

I do it regularly, with little problem. In Python 3, both text and 
identifiers are unicode. I do not know that there are any fixed-pitch 
unicode fonts. It would make ascii chars spaced too far apart. Idle 3.x 
has to accommodate Python 3.x code, which include unicode identifiers as 
well as strings.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy