Terry, thanks for the detailed writing of your thoughts on the matter and their context.

Serhiy's argument (in msg246602) is that different terminals interpret different control characters in different ways, and that we have no way of unifying their behavior.  This is true, and I will add that we should also not aim to fully emulate any single terminal nor multiple types of terminals.

On the other hand, there is a common ground where the vast majority of terminals do, in fact, behave very similarly WRT control characters.  For example, IDLE already does interpret '\n' in a special way (partially because the underlying Tk text widget does).  The same goes for '\t'.

I argue that we should instead *slightly* expand the set of control characters which IDLE interprets, to include a few more which are universally treated in a consistent manner.

Looking at the list of ASCII control characters on Wikipedia[1], I don't think any beyond \a, \b, \n, \r and \t are universal enough and in common enough use to merit inclusion.  (For reference, \a is for "bell".)

..[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes


I find the suggestion to have more than a single "mode" for the IDLE shell contrary to the "simple and novice friendly" design principle that we are aiming for.  I also think that it would bring little added benefit to the great majority of our users.


As for other control characters and astral characters, I very much agree that we could do better than to have them often "garbled" as done by the Tk text widget.  I think this should be dealt with as a separate issue.