A different kind of interface

[Ben Finney]

bearophileHUGS at lycos.com writes:

> I use the Python shell daily, plus of course normal editors to edit
> python scripts. They both are very useful for different purposes.
> But the default interactive shell isn't much handy if you want to
> modify the past code to run it again, or you want to embed a bit of
> text in the code, or if you want to produce something a bit more
> clean that you can save, or just if you want to edit and debug
> 7-lines long programs.

Adding an editor to Python solves this problem only for Python. I
certainly wouldn't want to learn a new text editor just for one
language. You're not *only* programming in Python, I hope?

Many of us solve this by using a single full-featured programmer's
editor that allows invoking a program — written in any of *dozens or
hundreds* of different languages — from within the editor.

It's a solution that only requires you to learn one editor interface,
having chosen one that's well-supported on all popular platforms and
with plug-ins accumulated over many years for a smorgasbord of
different tasks. The leaders in the field, by far, are GNU Emacs
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html> and Vim
<URL:http://vim.org/>.

-- 
 \          “Jury: A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge |
  `\       about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have |
_o__)                           failed to fool him.” —Henry L. Mencken |
Ben Finney