Idle

For those of you (like my self) who don’t do much “heavy” code, IDLE is ideal!

Bright, easy and already installed on to your computer when you download python, IDLE, is with out a doubt, one of the most simple Text Editors out there. It is clear why it is used for beginners of coding, and honestly there isn’t much to steer you away from it. It runs code, it saves your work and is nice and colourful… So, at it’s base, it can do the essentials and necessities any other text editor can do.

Making use of a Power Shell IDLE gets you to write your code locally in a separate window/file, which when ran will output any displays in the Power Shell (the Script Editor) . It is easy to interpret and also intractable with in the Shell, i.e if there is a type raw_input within the code, then you can answer it here. Also, you can live write code straight in to the shell, such as type 2+2 and it shall run it (another example is creating entire functions with in the shell, or writing a class and inherit methods etc from the code in the file). An issue, however, with this is that the shell doesn’t save any extra code you write in to it.

As I said at the beginning, if you don’t do much “heavy” code then IDLE is a good choice. Though, as you develop your understanding for coding, your need for a text editor which suits you increases too. There is very very very little customization, most of which is under the options tab for IDLE. This changes text styles, sizes and a few miscellaneous things with in IDLE. This is opposed to some text editors where you can change anything and everything (including choosing you own colours for code). As well, IDLE has very few “neat” tricks, i.e: Sublime offers assumptions for code you are writing (If your function was 20 characters long, you might want a quicker way to write it out), Vim allows you to make macros to perform some tasks such as indenting each line at once. IDLE is, simply, a beginners’ text editor, and that is how it will stay.

Saying that, unless you need to pull from gitter, or launch a satellite with django, IDLE can still do all your code that you want it to do! (As long as its it is possible with the standard python library…)

So overall, IDLE is a editor for new coders, and shouldn’t be shunned for not being as complicated and hard to use as other Text Editors, but instead praised for getting masses into coding!

Getting Started

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Tutorials

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