IDLE

Integrated development environment for Python

This article is about Python's Integrated Development Environment. For the IMAP feature for active email notification, see IMAP IDLE. For cancer, see indolent lesions of epithelial origin. For other uses, see idle (disambiguation).

IDLE

IDLE in action under Ubuntu: shell with highlights settings

Original author(s)| Guido van Rossum
Initial release| December 22, 1998; 26 years ago (1998-12-22)
Stable release|

3.12.9[1] / 4 February 2025; 6 months ago (4 February 2025)

Repository|

* github.com/python/cpython/tree/master/Lib/idlelib

Written in| Python
Type| Integrated development environment
Website| docs.python.org/library/idle.html

IDLE (short for Integrated Development and Learning Environment)[2][3] is an integrated development environment for Python, which has been bundled with the default implementation of the language since 1.5.2b1.[4][5] It is packaged as an optional part of the Python packaging with many Linux distributions. It is completely written in Python and the Tkinter GUI toolkit (wrapper functions for Tcl/Tk).

IDLE is intended to be a simple IDE and suitable for beginners, especially in an educational environment. To that end, it is cross-platform, and avoids feature clutter.

According to the included README, its main features are:

* Multi-window text editor with syntax highlighting, autocompletion, smart indent and other features.
* Python shell with syntax highlighting.
* Integrated debugger with stepping, persistent breakpoints, and call stack visibility.

Author Guido van Rossum says IDLE stands for "Integrated Development and Learning Environment",[6] and since Van Rossum named the language Python after the British comedy group Monty Python, the name IDLE was probably also chosen partly to honor Eric Idle, one of Monty Python's founding members.[7][8]

## See also

[edit]

* Free and open-source software portal

* List of integrated development environments for Python

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "Changelog". Retrieved 1 April 2025.
2. ^ From the Help > About screen
3. ^ "IDLE — Python 3.9.5 documentation". Archived from the original on 2020-06-04. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
4. ^ Subject: IDLE 0.1 -- a Python IDE Archived 2018-09-25 at the Wayback Machine, By Guido van Rossum - 16 Nov 1998 - comp.lang.python, At the conference I mentioned a few times that I was working on a Tkinter-based IDE for Python. I've decided to use the paradigm "release early and often" for this piece of software (especially since I don't expect I'll have much time to work on it), so version 0.1 (essentially a dump of my directory) is now sitting in the contrib directory ftp.python.org.
5. ^ IDLE 0.1 was distributed with the Python 1.5.2b1 release on 12/22/98., From: \Python-1.5.2\Tools\idle\NEWS.txt
6. ^ "IDLE — Python 3.9.2 documentation". docs.python.org. Retrieved 2021-02-26.
7. ^ Lutz, Mark & Ascher, David (2004). Learning Python, p. 40. O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 978-0-596-00281-7.
8. ^ Hammond, Mark; Robinson, Andy (2000). Python programming on Win32 (1. ed.). O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 59\. ISBN 978-1-56592-621-9.

## External links

[edit]

* Media related to IDLE at Wikimedia Commons
* IDLE home page in the Python documentation
* IDLE page in the Python wiki
* A guide to using IDLE

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