On 25 Jan, 2009, at 22:52, Bruce Sherwood wrote:
I'll comment that David Scherer, who in 2000 made a major upgrade to IDLE in connection with his creation of VPython (vpython.org), has recently done some work off to the side to make needed improvements to IDLE, and not just bug fixes. I think he got discouraged by there seeming to be no real path for making changes that would make it into the regular Python distribution, so he has gone in the direction of building (again) an alternative version of IDLE that we would package as "VIDLE" with distribution of VPython. This initiative is however on hold at the moment because he has personal business to attend to at this time. I do expect him to get back to this work within a few months.
AFAIK the best way to get changes into the python.org tree is to file bugreports with patches.
Here is an informal list of problems (BAS is me, DS is Scherer):On Mac, BAS notes sluggishness of the scrollbar slider getting behind the mouse in a serious way, even hanging up.
Patches are greatly appreciated. [...]
On the Mac, nonactive windows don't display their selections. This makes find and replace utterly unusable in IDLE, since the item to be replaced isn't highlighted!
Likewise.
There is no options/preferences window on the Mac!
There is a bug in all released versions of 2.6 that surpress the options/preferences menu unless you install a custom Tcl/Tk framework instead of relying on the system install of Tcl/Tk.
The Mac key combinations need work.On the Mac, mouse control often gets messed up after switching away and back to IDLE.
[...]
Mac users expect to be able to scroll on a trackpad by dragging two fingers; the current Mac IDLE doesn't deal with this.
[...]
Scott David Daniels commented on Mac IDLE problem of misplaced editing position:To get evidence of this -- start idle from a terminal window with a "python25 -m idlelib.idle" where python25 is the path to your python executable. You get output on stderr each time the mouse drops a line of mouse positioning. Jim Mueller reports: -------------------2754 6 days ago Mac version of IDLE doesn't scroll as expected open alextrobhttp://bugs.python.org/issue27543549 6 days ago Missing IDLE Preferences on Mac pending pchewhttp://bugs.python.org/issue3549 After reading the first one, I can verify that I see this effect too. The second one states that the Options->Configure menu has become IDLE->Preferences on the mac, but there was a bug in how theychecked the Tk version. So it should bite you if you have a version ofTk < 8.4.10. It states that this was fixed on Friday and is in the trunk and backported to the 2.6 and 3.1 versions of Python. (3.1?)
That's correct. The fix is in the 2.6 maintenance branch and the Python 2.x and Python 3.x trunks. I haven't had time to backport to the 3.0 maintenance branch yet.
Anyway below is my previous message, which is probably out of date now.I have tried out idle from both the current Enthought and the one that comes with MacPython. The only things I see are: 1) If I open a new window, or open a file, occasionally I get an error RCNE SendEventToEventTarget (suom Moved ) failed, -50
This does not happen every time, and maybe it could happen selecting
other menu items. I haven't tried everything, and it is intermittent
on those where I do see it. I can't give an impression of whether it
occurs more frequently in one distribution than another, because after
playing for 5 minutes on each, I only have a handful of instances
total. Any comparison would no be statistically significant, but it
does not seem to be a large problem. Of course that might just be my
hardware.
2) If I click in one window and then back in source window, Focus is
changed to the source window but the cursor position is still where it
was when I was last in that window. Once focus has been shifted to
that window, cursor move properly when I click on text. This is a
"feature" that I see all the time on Macs. When I have two browser
windows open I click on a button in one, it has no effect unless that
window already has the focus. This is sometimes annoying for me in
that I don't want to have to click twice to get something to happen.
Other times I am happy that the button I just happen to click on while
trying to bring a window to the front didn't actually register the
click.
3) I haven't been able to get the scrollbar problem to occur, but
again if it is an intermittent problem, perhaps I just haven't tried
long enough.
4) The reason that the new Enthought distribution has a "Configure
IDLE" menu option is that they threw out the IDLE.app. Instead they
provide a simple shell script, ".command" which then runs "/Library/
Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin/idle" in a console
window. So the configure problem is in IDLE.app, not idle.
Later, more from Jim Mueller:
The patch works.
In macosxSupport.py, if you change the line
if tkversion >= '8.4.14':
to
if map(int, tkversion.split('.')) >= (8, 4, 14):
then you get an IDLE->Preferences menu, which contains all the
configuration stuff.
Of course this works, I wouldn't have closed the bugreport unless I knew the issue was fixed by my change (unlike whoever introduced the bug in the first place, the if statement was introduced somewhere during the development of Python 2.6 and never did what it is supposed to do). I hadn't noticed before because I don't actually use IDLE myself (or Tkinter for that matter)
I haven't checked the 2.5.4 version of MacPython, but since thischange only went into the repository on Friday. It might not be in thebundle.
The fix shouldn't be necessary for 2.5.4, unless someone helpfully backported the bug to the 2.5.x branch.
BTW. W.r.t to Mac isssue: some of the issues mentioned above might be related to Tcl/Tk problems, which would mean there's no easy fix for them. I'd really appreciate if someone who actually know's Tcl/Tk and/ or Tkinter could look at these problems, I know just enough of Tkinter to make obvious bugfixes and not enough to actually investigate these problems.
Ronald
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