Warning

Most of the documentation was written prior to version 0.5 and needs to be updated. This work has now started for version 0.7 and we aim to have it completed before version 0.8 is available.

About IDLE

IDLE is often the first program that is used by beginners learning Python since it is installed with Python. It includes its own REPL (known as its “shell”) and enable users to write code in editors and run them, with the output redirected to the shell.

Before Python version 3.10.0a5, IDLE did not allow a user to define their own “exception hook” to modify the information shown to a user. Since then, it is possible to have IDLE use a custom exception hook except when dealing with syntax errors. Furthermore, the changes that made this possible have been ported to Python 3.9.5 and 3.8.10.

A better alternative

Instead of using IDLE as described in the following pages, provided that you have a version of IDLE that support exception hooks already installed on your computer, simply install friendly_idle and start it from a terminal using either friendly_idle or friendly-idle: you will automatically have a version of IDLE that will incorporate all the features of friendly without having to import it.