[Idle-dev] IDLE shell: Moving prompts to a side-bar

[Terry Reedy]

On 11/1/2019 6:45 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> If I’d known that was possible I’d have done that 2 years ago. So +1.

Did you mean 20 years ago (1999), when (AFAIK) you submitted the first 
patches?

In any case, I appreciate the quick positive response from you and 
André.  I posted the idea for this over 5 years ago and a majority of 
people, including the two commenting on the current issue,
https://bugs.python.org/issue37903
have not been as enthusiastic (as in don't seem to have gotten why it is 
a great idea).

 > On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 7:37 PM Tal Einat <taleinat at gmail.com> wrote:

 >> I'm attaching a screenshot to make it easy to get a feel for what is 
proposed.

I should have mocked this years ago in my post to
https://bugs.python.org/issue7676

As it is, the screenshot does not yet show 8-column tab indents replaced 
with 4-space indents. (An immediate follow-on patch.) The following 
better shows this part of the goal.

 >>>|print("Hello, world")
    |Hello, world!
 >>>|if True:
...|    if "Let's get rid of 8-space tabs!":
...|        print("This indentation is just right.")
...|
    |This indentation is just right.

where the strength and visibility of the vertical line depends on the OS 
widgets and the background colors of the sidebar and text box.


I have more recently tried to (somewhat conservatively) 'reimagine' how 
the IDLE's shell should operate, following these principles:
1. User code should be executed properly.  AFAIK, done.
2. User code should be formatted properly (as in the editor).  This is 
not  true now but will be with this change and the follow-up indent change.
3. Interaction should be made as easy as possible, even if it means 
looking or operating a bit differently from the standard REPL.  IDLE 
already does this somewhat, and posted ideas for follow-up changes to
https://bugs.python.org/issue37892

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy