friendly_idle is now available. This is just a quick announcement. Eventually I plan to write a longer blog post explaining how I use import hooks to patch IDLE and to provide seamless support for friend/friendly_traceback. Before I incorporated "partial" support for IDLE within friendly, I had released a package named friendly_idle ... but this is really a much better version.
When you launch it from a terminal, the only clue you get that this is not your regular IDLE is from the window title.
And, of course, it can also do so for runtime errors.
The same is true for code run from a file as well:
If the code in a file contains some syntax error, friendly_idle is often much more helpful than IDLE. Here's an example from IDLE:
And the same example run using friendly_idle
Unfortunately, the tkinter errorbox does not use a monospace font (assumed by friendly/friendly_traceback for the formatting), and does not allow customization. I might have to figure out how to create my own dialog, hopefully with support for monospace font and colour highlighting. If anyone has some experience doing this, feel free to contact me! ;-)