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 <m...@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
> 
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> IDLE-dev@python.org
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