Python's IDLE editor is much better now | Hacker News Reader

Python's IDLE editor is much better now

17 pointswheelerof4te5 comments

People used to say all kinds of things about Python's native IDLE editor, but lately it has become a viable alternative for me to other editors like Notepad++.

At least on Windows, where you have no autocompletion when you launch Python inside a shell, it's a godsend.

IDLE got line numbers in Python 3.8, and with that change it became good enough for most quick scripts.

The editor itself is highly customisable, it has a debugger and primitive auto-completion of callables and global variables. You can make your own theme or just use IDLE Dark like a normal person :)

So, thank you for improving IDLE! I hope it gets tabs some day, but I know that would be hard to implement.

Nice. People often dismiss IDLE as too basic, but at least is available by default in the base system. That's godsend when you're taking your first steps learning a language. I believe IDLE single-handedly made me a Python programmer instead of a Ruby programmer. I tried Ruby first, to this day it think it's even a nicer language, drawing much inspiration from Smalltalk. But trying to set the environment for the first time, I got stuck trying to call the ruby interpreter from a text editor, and gave up. With Python there was IDLE out of the box, and there was no such problem. Languages that save you the chore of assembling a proper environment from loose parts by hand before any actual programming are a blessing.

It is not good enough for some simple situation. For instance, the up arrow ↑ in keyboard is not work. Sometimes I have a typo in my code line, such as `from itertools import chains`, here `chains` should be `chain`, so it raise an exception. In Python shell, I could press ↑ to show this line again and only delete the last letter. But ↑ can not work in IDLE, I have to copy or re-input the whole line.

If IDLE is as awesome as Jupyter, then the spring is here.

They have different purposes. Jupyter is not a editor, it's a tool for quick data-sciency scripting.

You can assign a shortcut for that.

Mine is Alt+Up/Down for history previous/next.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com