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.

IDLE’s colours

In most other programs where colour output is possible, friendly uses Rich and pygments, either directly or indirectly, to add colour. This is not possible when using IDLE.

Idle provides a few pre-defined element types to which colouring can be applied.

Idle color scheme

In the default scheme:

  1. The default colour is black.

  2. Anything “printed” normally (print() --> sys.stdout) is in blue.

  3. Anything printed following an exception (sent to sys.stderr) is in red.

  4. IDLE uses a red background to highlight a specific position of a syntax error as identified by Python.

Friendly makes use of the colours chosen for these four basic elements when it formats the information presented to the user. The specific colour used for each of these cases can be changed using IDLE’s ‘Options->Configure IDLE’ menu item.