[Idle-dev] KeyConfig, KeyBinding and other related issues.

[Tal Einat]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 3:55 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 6/12/2014 6:20 PM, Tal Einat wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 10:10 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> 2. Runtime: I would be inclined to accept without comment (message box).
>>> However, I do not know how 3rd party extensions get 'installed'.
>>
>> What do you mean "installed"? I know a lot about the extension
>> mechanism and will happily help here.
>
> I think I found much of the current answer in the config-extensions.def
> comments. Someone puts an extension file in idlelib and, adds *by hand*, a
> corresponding entry to idlelib/config-extensions.def. This entry defines the
> system defaults for the extension and constitutes 'installation' as I meant
> it. A user on the system customizes added extensions just like built-in
> extensions: hand-edit .idlerc/config-extensions.cfg to add a custom entry.

Precisely.

> As I understand it, your extensions dialog will take care of the second
> part, editing the user file, but depends on entries already being in the
> default file.

Yes. Still, considering the large number of extensions bundled with
IDLE and how major the features supplied by some of them are, IMO an
extension config dialog would be immensely useful even as things are.

> Idle does not seem to have anticipated an ecosystem of 3rd-party extensions,
> and the waste of 1000s of people hand-editing config-extensions.def. A
> feature complementary to editing existing entries would be automatic
> recognition of new extensions and copying of an config entry from extension
> file to the .def file.  Are there any some extensions that come with a
> script to do this?

Not that I am aware of.

I'm also not aware of 1000's of people actually installing IDLE
extensions. The few extensions to be found on PyPI (some of which I
made) are hardly ever downloaded.

> Proposal: define a format for config entries in .py files, perhaps copying
> one already in use if there are any. Add a directory, such as /extensions to
> contain files that have such entries. The rest should be easy enough to work
> out.

Better installation of IDLE extensions has come up before. But that's
an entirely different matter, and much lower priority IMO. Relevant:
Roger Serwy's IdleX [1] has an extension manager.

.. [1]: http://idlex.sourceforge.net/

- Tal