[Idle-dev] walkthrough/snapshot of IDLE user interface improvements to date

[Al Sweigart]

Hi Chris. I believe Mark is working on getting IDLE to be able to use more
native-looking widgets with his tkinter work. As for "style sheets", IDLE
already has something similar to this with the customizable syntax
highlighting. I have some loose ideas for how this could be improved, and I
was thinking that once the unified interactive shell/file editor window was
done, updating the colors would be a good idea to give the "new IDLE" a
more distinctive look (maybe something along the lines of Sublime Text's
color scheme).

These are just idle thoughts, so to speak, and far from an actual proposal
on my part.

-Al

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 4:42 AM, Chris Roffey <chris at codingclub.co.uk> wrote:

> Dear Mark
>
> This is excellent! It is humbling to see how much work is done by a
> dedicated few on IDLE development.
> I have read  through the document you linked to and found it very
> interesting. Ensuring IDLE looks professional and natural on all platforms
> is very important for students (the biggest cohort of beginners) as they
> make first impressions very quickly. Getting rid of annoying bugs is also
> very important as it gives one less thing for students to moan about -
> remember, learning to program, requires a great deal of persistence and
> resilience - every unnecessary obstacle is a potential turn-off for
> possibly able students. So all the IDLE-dev team’s hard work on this is
> invaluable.
>
> Keeping things simple appears to be a mantra of this group - and it is a
> good one. I am no longer convinced that having a complete panelled IDLE
> interface like I suggested before is necessary or even the best option. I
> now think that keeping any windowed apps (using tkinter or turtle modules)
> out of the interface simplifies and makes it more flexible as long as they
> appear on top when run. There was a time when turtle windows appeared
> behind the shell window and the script window meaning a lot of the turtle’s
> activity was missed while the window was found. This appears to be fixed
> and it appears front central now (on my Mac at least) – perfect!
>
> I have been developing my thoughts further trying to produce my ideal
> IDE/text editor for teaching with. I have called it CREATE rather than IDLE
> so that it is easier to refer to (rather than Chris Roffey’s possible
> version of IDLE.)
>
> http://codingclub.co.uk/images/CREATE-overview.png
>
> Feature wise, I am not sure that it is very challenging in terms of
> programming as I am not suggesting many feature requests (except major
> things like ‘Deploy' - that could be developed outside of this team and
> then linked to.) A lot of work would need to be done on documentation and
> aliases for error messages but this IS something I could help with.
> However, is tkinter up to the sort of sliding panels I am suggesting? Mark,
> please sit down for this next question - I am loath to make it as I know
> how much work people have already done and I am well aware I am new to the
> group but - would it be better to use a more sophisticated system for the
> graphical side of IDLE that implements platform native windowing facilities
> and allows for style sheets? This might take away some of the complexities
> of implementing tkinter features for the users whilst running tkinter in
> the IDE - I don’t know?
>
> The reason I make such bold statements is I am aware of the trend in
> education recently is to produce fantastic drag and drop environments for
> students coding prior to learning a text based language like Python e.g.
> Scratch (fantastic), Kodu (not so sure). So to make a good impression, any
> IDE needs to compete at least in terms of looks and ease of use with these.
> Although I agree with others on this group that IDLE should not be trying
> to compete with professional IDEs currently available - I do think that
> students deserve something as sophisticated and professional as the
> developers, but written with them in mind.
>
> The question is, should and could IDLE do this?
>
> Best wishes
> Chris
>
> > On 31 Aug 2015, at 20:44, Mark Roseman <mark at markroseman.com> wrote:
> >
> > As I’ve been making changes to various pieces of IDLE’s user interface,
> I’ve been documenting the updates in the form of a case study. I hope that
> will be useful to others modernizing a Tk-based application. I’ve put a
> draft of that, as well as a snapshot of the current code, here:
> >
> >       http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/idle.html
> >
> > I’m looking forward to helping do whatever I can to migrate some of
> these changes into IDLE’s official codebase. But in the meantime if anyone
> can take a read or try the code, that would be great!
> >
> > Some of the deeper changes to allow (cleanly) for more of a single
> window model will probably have to wait until a few more of these
> preliminaries find their way in.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > IDLE-dev mailing list
> > IDLE-dev at python.org
> > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev
>
> _______________________________________________
> IDLE-dev mailing list
> IDLE-dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/idle-dev/attachments/20150902/297c8969/attachment.html>