On 10/19/2013 2:31 PM, Tim Chase wrote:
On 2013-10-19 14:08, David Robinow wrote:
On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 9:01 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
You can try all these out in the interactive interpreter (you
probably have IDLE installed, which on Windows is rather nicer to
work with than the default interactive mode).
IDLE is cross-platform. Could you explain why you say "on
Windows"?
In my experience, the Win32 Python console lacks readline support
(like my stock Python on the Mac OS X machine I have here), and as
such lacks a lot of the niceties. At least on Win32, there is
recall of previous commands (my Mac lacks even that), but there's no
easy "search for the previous command I typed that contains the
following keyword" (control-R followed by search term), no easy
"insert all matching filenames here" (alt+asterisk), etc.
Idle may not provide all that, but it hopefully provides at least
*some* basic features that the console python.exe lacks.
Command Prompt almost 'religiously' imitates the DOS character
interface. The mouse is mostly ignored; it is not tied to the cursor.
Idle is a normal Windows gui app.
Command Prompt displays a window of k lines of a circular queue of n
lines, which are initialized as blank. The default n=300 is not enough
for a test suite run or many help() outputs. If you find the box on the
3rd tab of properties, n can be increased up to 9999, but if you do, the
scroll bar becomes rather useless, as it scrolls through all n lines.
Idle has a normal expanding buffer, with no extra blank lines added.
CP does not have proper cut and paste. I'll leave out most of the
obnoxious details, but selections are rectangular blocks. This is the
only function for the mouse, and uses a separate mouse cursor. Idle has
normal cut and paste that works like any other Windows app.
Idle can recall previous input two different ways, by cursor or key. One
can use the mouse to select where to edit. CP requires use of arrow keys
to move the cursor around. Idle recall input *statements*. CP recalls
input *lines*. Previous multiline statements have to be recalled a line
at a time. CP was not designed for true multiline commands (as opposed
to long commands that wrap and display as multiple lines).
CP has no menu (other than a few entries when one right-clicks on the
icon in the upper left). There is no way to directly save or print the
buffer.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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