Running IDLE

IDLE stands for "Integrated DeveLopment Environment" and is the development environment officially distributed with Python. There is an IDLE home page which contains a link to an excellent tutorial. However, the tutorial is focused on using IDLE and only briefly mentions how to start IDLE on Microsoft Windows.

To use IDLE on Windows, just follow the instructions in the tutorial.

To use IDLE on Mac OS X 10.4, you need to start a Terminal window and type:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/bin/idle

To use IDLE on Linux, you have to be lucky or do some dirty work. Standard versions of Python on Linux, unfortunately, frequently do not support Tkinter, a critical user interface toolkit used by IDLE. You can try running:

/usr/lib/python2.3/idlelib/idle

If this command results in a complaint about Tkinter, then you will either need to build your own version of Python, or not use IDLE.