Table of Contents

IDLE

IDLE is the Python development environment.

Common Problems

Can't Open IDLE

You need to “kill” all the idle processes. A dangerous shortcut is

pkill python

It will give you a warning message but usually works

Or, you can say

ps -ax

Which shows you all (-a) the processes. Then, kill the process by their ids (PID)

kill <pid>

IDLE Shell Won't Get New Input

If the IDLE shell is acting weird with the prompts when they want to run something (like it's still executing another program), just hit enter a few times or control-c to cancel that and then execute the program again.

IDLE Exits When Program Executes

If IDLE is exiting completely when a program executes, then try opening the Python program in jEdit and then executing the program on the command-line/in a terminal. After testing in jEdit, try again in IDLE.