Improved Version of IDLE

VIDLE is a (hopefully temporary) fork of IDLE created in December 2008 by VPython developer David Scherer, assisted by Bruce Sherwood, and greatly extended by Guilherme Polo in a 2009 Google Summer of Code project. It is hoped that the bug fixes and interface improvements will become part of the IDLE that ships with Python; in the meantime we need to deliver them to our users. We have changed its name because we don't want those responsible for maintaining the version of IDLE included with Python itself to be confused by questions about this version.

VIDLE is based on IDLE 1.2.2. VIDLE's source and version history beginning with a checkin of IDLE 1.2.2 can be found in VPython's CVS repository (vpython-core2/site-packages/vidle) on sourceforge (follow directions from www.vpython.org). The work of Guilherme Polo is found in a Subversion branch of Python; see the archives of the idle-dev list. His diffs are available at http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2009-python/downloads/list

- Fix: Unreliable and slow termination of user program on Windows; now you can re-run without first closing the graphics window.
- Fix: Missing preferences and other menus on Macintosh.
- Use any port for RPC server, so multiple instances of VIDLE can run at the same time without interference.
- You can specify that you can write and run test routines without having to save first (you're warned upon quitting whether to save)
- In the case of an error, the shell window comes forward to alert you.

Download and unzip the zip file to obtain a folder "vidle2" or "vidle3" to be copied to site-packages or dist-packages. As with IDLE, you start VIDLE by executing the file idle.pyw.

vidle2: VIDLE for Python 2.x

vidle3: VIDLE for Python 3.x

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