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What does it mean to "restart" a program (in my case IDLE)?

This answer on Stack Overflow offers a solution I am trying to implement. In particular, see the sections "Installation Instructions" and "How to Use".
Can anyone tell me the steps required to "restart" IDLE?
New Information:
Just as people have suggested I thought this simply meant closing the program and opening it back up again...but I already tried that.
The other twist to my situation is that I'm working on a virtual machine so I was unable to do the installation of IDLE2HTML.py myself. My work's Help Desk had to do it so I cannot speak for the accuracy of their work. For now I'm assuming they did it correctly, but when I go to the "Options" menu there is no option to "Save as HTML".
My only guess at this point is that I still need to "restart IDLE".
Just wanted to double check if there was something else I could do before going back to my Help Desk department.

IDLE reads the idlelib/config-xyz.def files, including config-extensions.def, just once, when it starts. So any changes to config-extensions.def only takes effect the next time you start IDLE.
If you do not see 'Save as HTML' after starting IDLE, the extension is not installed properly.

It means you need to close the IDLE so that any changes made by the script can affect the IDLE
Simply close the IDLE either via the X, Ctrl+Q or File>Exit, then open the IDLE again.
If you are using idlelib module from a Python program then close your program and run it again.

How to copy text from IDLE?

Is there a way to copy text out of Python IDLE on a Mac? When I highlight text and copy then past into a text editor, I get the same text pasted. It is some of the first text I start with in IDLE. None of the other text will copy out.

From The Things I Hate About IDLE That I Wish Someone Would Fix (from 2011):
1.2) NEW FEATURE: Auto-Copy-On-Highlight
Once we get rid of being able to move the cursor off the last line, that opens a new opportunity to implement an automatic copy-on-highlight feature that many terminal and IRC client programs implement. Since this text is read-only, the only reason a person has for highlighting it is to copy it (they can’t delete it.) As soon as the user highlights text in the shell window, it is copied to the clipboard.

Looks like the best you can do is save as a .py file. Open that in a text editor and continue working in IDLE. With each save, the text editor will refresh with all updates, including errors. At least TextWrangler will.

Sometimes in things like a linux terminal you can't do a normal copy and paste, try holding Command/Control + Shift + C after highlighting things and seeing if that works, since you're on mac i'm not sure if it would be the Command or Control key so try both
EDIT: There is an apple discussion about the exact same thing. They discuss going into the options menu, then into configuration and navigating to the keys section. Then you use a built in key-set, their suggestion is using IDLE Classic Mac.

I cannot tell from your description exactly what you did and what happened. But I can recommend that you upgrade to 3.4.4 or 3.5.1 (or 2.7.11 for 2.7 users). Among other improvements, they all contain a patch to make right-click for context menu work on Mac Aqua. This was issue 24801 on the CPython bug tracker.
If there is still an actual problem on Mac, I would like to know so it can be fixed.

Formatting Python string output

I'm writing a calculator currently and I'd like to have results displayed in a visually appealing form. The program just has a command line interface for the moment, but I've been trying to find a way to do various things with the results it displays. For example, I'd like to have it display the result in a bigger font size, a different font than system default, and even subscripts and superscripts. From what I could find, the best way to do such things would be if I introduced a GUI and used something like wxPython, and using Unicode code points can only resolve part of the issue. Moreover, for various reasons, I'd just like to have the program in command line for the moment.

I don't think you can accomplish this with the command line, but you might check out curses. I would suggest picking up a GUI for this sort of thing. It's really not too hard to learn and Python's builtin Tkinter is perfectly functional for getting started. There are many good resources for Tkinter. Here are a few I like:
effbot.org
Thinking in Tkinter
An Introduction to Tkinter
WxPython is excellent, but if you are just getting started my suggestion would be to start with Tkinter. Others might disagree...
EDIT
I just remembered running across the console module for Windows. I suspect it won't won't get you what you want, but at least it's out there.

If you're running this on the command line, I'm almost certain that there's nothing you can do to override the font preferences set by the user. In both windows and Linux, the font settings of the command line are user controlled, and I doubt that you can change it without sudo access. Seeing as you're writing a calculator, I don't think a user would want to run it as sudo - I certainly wouldn't want to run something as simple as a calculator with sudo privileges. To require that would make the user think that you are up to something malicious

Get content from open window in Linux

I want to collect data and parse it eventually from an open window in linux.
An example- Suppose a terminal window is open. I need to retrieve all the data that appears on that window. After retrieval, I would parse it to get specific commands entered.
So is it possible to do that? If so, how? I would prefer to use python to code this entire thing.
I am making a guess that first I would have to get some sort of ID for the open window and then use some kind of library to get the content from the window whose ID I have got.
Please help. I am quite a newbie.

You can (ab)use the assistive technologies support (for screen readers and such) that exist in the toolkit libraries. Whether it will work is toolkit specific—Gtk and Qt have this support, but others (like Tk, Fltk, etc.) may or may not.
The Linux Desktop Testing Project is a python toolkit for abusing these interfaces for testing GUI applications, so you can either use it or look how it works and do similar thing.

I think the correct answer may be "with some difficulty". Essentially, the contents of a window is a bitmap. This bitmap is drawn on by a whole slew of primitives (including "display this octet-string, using that encoding and a specific font"), but the window contents is still "just pixels".
Getting the "just pixels" is pretty straight-forward, as these things go. You open a session to the X server and say "given me the contents of window W" and it hands it over.
Doing something useful with it is, unfortunately, a completely different matter, as you'd potentially have to (essentially) OCR the bitmap for what you want.
If you decide to take that route, have a look at the source of xwd, as that does, essentially, that.

Do you have some sort of control over the execution of the terminal? In that case, you can use the script command in the terminal session to log all interaction to a file and then read and parse the file.
$ script myfile
Script started, file is myfile
$ ls
...
$ exit
Script done, file is myfile
$ parse_file.py myfile
If the terminal is running inside of screen, you have other options as well. Screen has logging built in, screen -X sends commands to a running screen session (man screen).

GEdit/Python execution plugin?

I'm just starting out learning python with GEdit plus various plugins as my IDE.
Visual Studio/F# has a feature which permits the highlighting on a piece of text in the code window which then, on a keypress, gets executed in the F# console.
Is there a similar facility/plugin which would enable this sort of behaviour for GEdit/Python? I do have various execution type plugins (Run In Python,Better Python Console) but they don't give me this particular behaviour - or at least I'm not sure how to configure them to give me this. I find it useful because in learning python, I have some test code I want to execute particular individual lines or small segments of code (rather then a complete file) to try and understand what they are doing (and the copy/paste can get a bit tiresome)
... or perhaps there is a better way to do code exploration?
Many thx
Simon

Yes, you use "external tools plugin"
http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/ToolLauncherPlugin
As an example,
Edit > Preferences
Plugins
Tick "External Tools"
Close the Preferences Window
Tools > Manage External Tools
Click the "Add new too" icon in the bottom left
Name it "Execute Highlighted Python Code"
give it a keyboard shortcut
change the input combo box to : "highlighted selection"
change the output to : "Display in Bottom Pane"
In the editor window for the tool, replace everything with :
.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
result = eval(sys.stdin.read())
print expression, "=>", result, type(result)
.

If you wish to see the result of entire .py file, you can put this code in your new created external tool window
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
exec(sys.stdin.read())
and change the Input to Current document.

For python, You can use "external tools plugin":
#!/bin/sh
python3 "$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH"
Option of external tool:
Save: Current Document
Input: Current Document
Output: Display in bottom panel
Language: Python or Python3
Don't forget the quotes around $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH....

To answer your second question, and hopefully guide you in a direction you'll be happier with, I think you ought to consider trying some different editors. There are many with more powerful code exploration features than GEdit has. Check out this post:
What IDE to use for Python?

I installed iPython console in gedit and do most of my simple scripting in it, but gedit is a very simple editor, so it'll not have some advance feature like an IDE
But if you want code exploring, or auto completion, I recommend a real IDE like Eclipse.
If you just want a editor, KomodoEdit is fine.

What I do is keep a file called python_temp.py. I have a shortcut to it in my dock. I use it as a scratch pad. Whenever I want to quickly run some code, I copy the code, click the shortcut in the doc, paste in the text and hit f5 to run. Quick, easy, simple, flexible.

I think what you're looking for is http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins/BetterPythonConsole.
You hit F5 and it runs the code in your file in a IDLE-like console. I don't know if it can only run selected code. (I don't think it can) but you can always copy the needed code in a new window and run it from there.
Have a look through the plugin list for other interesting stuff: http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/Plugins

The closest to a decent IDE...
Install gedit-developer-plugins (through synaptic || apt-get) and don't forget to enable (what you need) from gEdit's plugins (Edit->Preferences [tab] plugins) and happy coding