Terry, please do give Squeezer a try before making a decision! Squeezer may be slightly more complex than ClearWindow in concept and in code, but IMO it is simpler and more appropriate for use by a novice user.

I'm attaching a screenshot to give a feeling of what working in the IDLE shell with Squeezer looks like. This screenshot was taken on Windows. Note that the second squeezed text is the very long "Max recursion depth" exception traceback, which I manually squeezed after it was printed.

Now I'll try to make the case for Squeezer one last time...


Nobody expects a Squeezer Inquisition! Amongst Squeezer's weaponry are such diverse elements as:

1. No fear! Squeezer automatically catches overly long outputs for users, so they need not fear crashing IDLE or losing their history just by printing something long accidentally.

2. No surprise! Squeezer requires no learning and is completely self-explanatory. It's an in-line button with a label of the form "Squeezed text (13412 lines)". Hovering over it with the mouse shows tooltip listing the various available interactions (expand, copy, preview). Don't want the text to be squeezed? Double-click and the button is replaced by the original text!

3. Ruthless efficiency! With Squeezer, IDLE will never slow down to a crawl again! (Well, unless you explicitly expand a very long output.)

4. Dashing red uniforms! Okay, not really, but it does look nice.

Also, beware *the comfy chair*! Squeezer conveniently allows one to manually squeeze exception tracebacks and other outputs to clean up the shell history. This is available via the right-click context menu.


Finally, I'll mention that ClearWindow forces a user to choose: delete your entire shell history, or keep it all. Squeezer allows a user to choose which parts to hide and which to keep, and nothing is ever lost since squeezed text can always be expanded again.

That's it. If this doesn't convince people of the utility of Squeezer, I truly believe nothing else will.