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Asked: 2026-05-11T03:14:39+00:00

Python for Windows by default comes with IDLE, which is the barest-bones IDE I’ve

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Python for Windows by default comes with IDLE, which is the barest-bones IDE I’ve ever encountered. For editing files, I’ll stick to emacs, thank you very much.

However, I want to run programs in some other shell than the crappy windows command prompt, which can’t be widened to more than 80 characters.

IDLE lets me run programs in it if I open the file, then hit F5 (to go Run-> Run Module). I would rather like to just ‘run’ the command, rather than going through the rigmarole of closing the emacs file, loading the IDLE file, etc. A scan of google and the IDLE docs doesn’t seem to give much help about using IDLE’s shell but not it’s IDE.

Any advice from the stack overflow guys? Ideally I’d either like

  • advice on running programs using IDLE’s shell

  • advice on other ways to run python programs in windows outside of IDLE or ‘cmd’.

Thanks,

/YGA

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  1. For an interactive interpreter, nothing beats IPython. It’s superb. It’s also free and open source. On Windows, you’ll want to install the readline library. Instructions for that are on the IPython installation documentation.

    Winpdb is my Python debugger of choice. It’s free, open source, and cross platform (using wxWidgets for the GUI). I wrote a tutorial on how to use Winpdb to help get people started on using graphical debuggers.

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