I love tweaking my coding workflow. Small improvements accumulate over time and can lead to a massive productivity increase. Today, I caught myself being annoyed that I always needed to spend three clicks or so just to open a Python file in IDLE, the default Python editor on Windows. Time to change that!
Do you want to open Python files in Windows by just double-clicking on them? Make the IDLE the default editor for Python files in a few simple steps:
Right-click a Python file, select Properties, and locate the “Opens with” section.
Click the Change button.
Select More Apps, scroll down, and click the text Look for another app on this PC.
Navigate to the Lib/idlelib/ path and select the file idle.bat.
Click Open and OK to close the Properties Window.
Congratulations! You can now open Python .py file in IDLE by double-clicking on them. 🤗
I’ve created a gif to help you nagivate through those steps—but be careful: it’s on my German Windows machine so you may see some strange-looking text snippets:
You can find a slightly more detailed guide here. If you want to learn more tips and tricks on how to save time and be a more productive coder, check out the Finxter email academy with plenty of Python tutorials and downloadable cheat sheets. Sign up here:
While working as a researcher in distributed systems, Dr. Christian Mayer found his love for teaching computer science students.
To help students reach higher levels of Python success, he founded the programming education website Finxter.com. He’s author of the popular programming book Python One-Liners (NoStarch 2020), coauthor of the Coffee Break Python series of self-published books, computer science enthusiast, freelancer, and owner of one of the top 10 largest Python blogs worldwide.
His passions are writing, reading, and coding. But his greatest passion is to serve aspiring coders through Finxter and help them to boost their skills. You can join his free email academy here.
How to really find clients on freelancing platforms such as Upwork, Freelancer.com, or Topcoder? This article shows you a simple idea of how to find clients. It’s a statistically sound way of increasing your odds greatly. I…
Working on Upwork, Freelancer.com, or Topcoder is not the only way of earning money to do some valuable work. In this video, I tell you an alternative way of earning money (almost) from day one. And I…
How to overcome procrastination? Procrastination may easily be the reason number one why you are not reaching your goals. You set your alarm clock in the evening and expect your future self in the morning to get…
How to make it easier as a freelance programmer to attract clients? You’ve mastered the first level as a freelance programmer and wonder how to make it easier to get clients? Or you’re generally interested in becoming…
Everybody talks about passive income these days. Is it a scam? Yes and no. Nothing can truly exist passively for an unlimited time. True passive income really means: a more or less slowly dying income stream. But…
A popular question in programming interviews is about anagrams. The interviewer wants to test your knowledge about the basic terminology in computer science, and how good you are at developing your own simple algorithms to solve the…
This one-liner introduces another basic computer science term: palindromes. Similarly to anagrams, palindromes are a popular interview question. First things first: What is a palindrome? “A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters…
Finding prime numbers is of critical importance for practical applications such as cryptography. Many public-key methods are only safe (from a cryptographic point of view) because it’s generally inefficient and slow to compute the prime factors of…
This article explains a simple and effective way of computing the factorial in a single line of code. The Basics Consider the following problem: There are 20 football teams in England’s premier league. Each team can possibly…
In this one-liner tutorial, you’ll learn about the popular sorting algorithm Quicksort. Surprisingly, a single line of Python code is all you need to write the Quicksort algorithm! If you just want to get a quick idea…
In this article, you’ll learn about a basic algorithm, every computer scientist must know: the binary search algorithm. If you just want to try the algorithm in Python, feel free to play with our interactive Python shell:…
Type “Helo World” into your Google search bar. Google will ask you: “Did you mean: hello world” A simple method to detect these typos is the Levensthein distance (also called edit distance). In fact, Google’s algorithm seems…
This is a simple algorithm to find all the powersets of a given set. If you feel like you need to refresh your Python set skills, have a look at my complete guide to Python sets (with…
What is the number one reason why you should consider working from home instead of working from where you work? The number one reason, I find, is commute time. It’s very healthy and good for your happiness…
Today I want to address a very controversial topic. I know why you feel stuck and you don’t improve as a coder anymore. You are stuck in coding because you don’t produce enough — you are consuming…
In this article, I want to discuss an important topic for me because it’s at the heart of what we are doing at Finxter. At the heart of Finxter is continuous improvement in computer science. For example,…
Today I want to propose a new habit for you which will ensure that you are on the path of continuous improvement in Python — on the path to mastery. Maybe you have read the book “The…
If you are a coder and you’ve developed software which you want to sell on the marketplace, you need to determine a strategy to protect your business in the long run. And if I write “protect”, I…
Why do YOU want to improve your coding skills? I vividly remember my first semester studying computer science more than 10 years ago. I knew almost nothing about coding. My uncle, a professional software developer, had quickly…
Short circuit evaluation in any programming language is the act of not executing unnecessary parts of a Boolean expression. Say, you want to calculate the result of the expression “A and B” but you already know that…
