Friendly IDLE

friendly_idle is now available.  This is just a quick announcement. Eventually I plan to write a longer blog post explaining how I use import hooks to patch IDLE and to provide seamless support for friend/friendly_traceback.  Before I incorporated "partial" support for IDLE within friendly, I had released a package named friendly_idle ... but this is really a much better version.

When you launch it from a terminal, the only clue you get that this is not your regular IDLE is from the window title.

Since Python 3.10 (and backported to Python 3.8.10 and 3.9.5), IDLE provide support for sys.excepthook() (see announcement).  Actually, in the announcement, it is not pointed out that this is only partial support: exceptions raised because of syntax errors cannot be captured by user-defined exception hooks.  However, fear not, friendly_idle is perfectly capable to help you when your code has some syntax errors.

And, of course, it can also do so for runtime errors.

The same is true for code run from a file as well:

If the code in a file contains some syntax error, friendly_idle is often much more helpful than IDLE. Here's an example from IDLE:

And the same example run using friendly_idle

Unfortunately, the tkinter errorbox does not use a monospace font (assumed by friendly/friendly_traceback for the formatting), and does not allow customization.  I might have to figure out how to create my own dialog, hopefully with support for monospace font and colour highlighting. If anyone has some experience doing this, feel free to contact me! ;-)