On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:28 PM, Alan Gauld <alan.ga...@btinternet.com> wrote: >> The "Python Screen" is what opens up when I click the Python button on >> the desktop. The book calls it a "console window, > > Yes, it's worth getting familiar with it. It provides the ultimate authority > on things like error messages etc. If all else fails try running your > programs direct from that window and you will see any output that a GUI > might hide. But to make it an effective > development tool there are a bunch of registry flags that > you need to set. You can read about them by typing 'help cmd' > in the console itself.
That's assuming the user ran cmd.exe to use its "help" command. Windows automatically opens a console window for python.exe if the process doesn't inherit one. That's what I would expect from a desktop shortcut. It's like running `x-terminal-emulator -e python` on a Debian Linux system. Except on Windows it's the python executable that opens the window, not the other way around. Wonkish: The window itself is hosted by another process, so multiple console applications can share the same window. It used to use a thread in the system process csrss.exe. But with UAC in Vista it got ugly to use a system process. Windows 7 introduced conhost.exe, running in the context of the console application. The architecture change is explained (with pictures!) in the following blog post: https://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2009/10/05/ windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-console-host.aspx _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor