Hi everyone, I just joined the list and wanted to say hello.
My name's phil jones and I've been writing in Python for about 3 years and am still looking for the right editor / development environment for me to work with Python. I use IDLE about half the time I write Python. There are things I like about it and things that drive me crazy. Sometimes I dream about writing an IDE of my own or contributing to, or adapting an existing one. So I figured I should join the list. I have several questions : 1) the first is obviously, what's going on with IDLE? Couldn't find much documentation or discussion about it on the web (in terms of documentation or tutorials for people coding it), nor does it seem to have changed much over the last couple of releases of Python. How is it considered? An acceptable editor to get started, but serious Python programmers graduate to a "real IDE" (if so, which one?). The main *free* Python development environment? Or something which people here are planning to grow much further? How many people are actively involved in IDLE development at the moment? 2) The main thing that drives me crazy with IDLE and makes it pretty much unusuable for me is this. I like to develop with two files open, one with the code I'm working on and a second with unit tests. Obviously the unit-test file is the one I want to run and I import the other file into it. It seems like IDLE only does this import once, so that if I run the unit test, find a bug, fix the bug in the other file and re-run the unit tests (by hitting F5), IDLE doesn't notice that the code changed. So I then have to execute my program from the windows command line instead of hitting F5. Is this really how IDLE behaves? Or am I just doing something wrong / stpid and there's a way to get the behavior I want in IDLE? 3) One of the things I like about IDLE is that it's in Tk and standard in the Python distro, so you can be sure it's there. I've been developing a program with an editor-like GUI and I decided to use Tk / Tix rather than something based on another GUI layer, because of this. I thought I might be able to re-use bits of IDLE for it, and even contribute some stuff back to IDLE. However, when I upgraded to Python 2.5 my code just stopped working - with an error message saying that Python can't find and include Tix. Anyone know what's up with that? I thought Tix was part of standard Python? Did it break? Did IDLE also have problems with the upgrade to 2.5? 4) I'm guess I'm also looking for people here who know what's going on in with Tk, Tix and Tkinter. Tk is pretty basic, is it still being developed? Is there any work going on on Tix or any Python GUI frameworks which sit on top of Tk? Obviously there's GTk and wxPython and the OS native libraries which seem to be prefered by most Python projects. But I'm really interested in the "batteries-included" story for Python. cheers phil jones http://www.synaesmedia.net _______________________________________________ IDLE-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev
