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[Python-Dev] IDLE in the stdlib

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Thu Mar 21 14:31:29 CET 2013 
On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Paul Moore writes:
>
>  > I have no figures one way or the other on that. You may well be
>  > right.  Are we aiming at "all Windows users" here?
>
> We need to be careful about this.  ISTM that IDLE is aiming at the
> subset of users on any platform who for some reason need/want a simple
> development environment that is consistent across Python versions and
> platforms and immediately available when they install Python, but
> don't have one yet.

When I'm on Windows, I use IDLE as my interactive interpreter, but
SciTE for actual development. Even on Linux, there's one feature that
CLI interactive mode lacks: multi-line command recall. To tinker with
a function definition in IDLE, just recall it and edit it. To tinker
with it in command-line Python, fetch back each of its lines, or edit
it elsewhere and paste it. IDLE isn't a program editor for me, it's
the face of Python.

ChrisA
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