Python IDLE freezes

Question

This is absolutely frustrating, but I am not sure if the following is an issue only on my machine or with IDLE in general.

When attempting to print a long list in the shell, and that could happen by accident while debugging, the program crushes and you have to restart it manually.

Even worse, if you have a few editor windows open, it always spawns a few sub-processes, and each of these has to be manually shut down from the task manager.

Is there any way to avoid that?

I am using Python 3, by the way.

Answer 1

It seems tk needs to write a lot of data in the shell frame, this takes a lot of time and when the list is long then it becomes unresponsive.

I did:

>>a = range(n)
>>print(list(a))

It was OK for n = 100 or n = 1000. After that point things started being slow. For n as low as 10000, moving the page up and down becomes very, very slow.

I suspect that there is no solution. For small values of n probably it would help to clear() the window but unfortunately idle have not implemented any method to clear the shell. I dont understand why because it should not be difficult...