A corollary of what I said is that if something is a bad idea for 3.3, it is probably a bad idea for 3.4.

On idle-dev thread "Feedback requested on issue 17609: ...", Bruce Sherwood says "For the thousands of students in our intro physics curriculum who use VIDLE (which I hope eventually can be replaced by using an updated IDLE), it is extremely important that starting IDLE (by clicking on an icon) display only an edit window at startup".

Idle is both a shell with editor and an editor with shell. The latter is a legitimate use case and I do not think we should remove the feature of making it a configuration option. So I think this issue should be closed as rejected (and see below).

On Windows, I believe one could accomplish Bruce's purpose with a customized Window's shortcut. Even is something similar is true on *nix and Mac, the details would probably be different on both. Learning all three systems is too much to expect of anyone.

I am sympathetic with the idea of making option processing easier (but not as the cost of making things harder for users). I believe using the newer argparse instead of the ancient getopt in PyShell.main might do that. It seems to me that the flow should be dict of builtin default updated by user configuration file updated by command line or function args. 'Function' refers to a possible new idlelib.idle.main for starting Idle from Python by passing options directly as arguments rather than by manipulating sys.argv.

I do not see 'remove a config option' as a goal.