What text editor is everyone using for Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 29 May 2009 14:00:19 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> In message <003af57e$0$9673$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, Steven D'Aprano
> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 29 May 2009 09:04:39 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> 
>>> In message <003a5518$0$9673$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, Steven
>>> D'Aprano wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Thu, 28 May 2009 20:58:07 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> In message <0039e83c$0$9673$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, Steven
>>>>> D'Aprano wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> A good UI standard should mean that:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> * all functionality should be discoverable without reading the
>>>>>> manual;
>>>>> 
>>>>> Which means no scripting languages are allowed?
>>>> 
>>>> "Should", not "must".
>>> 
>>> If you meant "may or may not", why don't you say "may or may not"?
>> 
>> "Should" does not mean "may or may not".
> 
> I'm not sure how there is supposed to be a difference in this context.
> "All people should fly by flapping their arms, except where this is
> physically impossible". You're asking for something that is infeasible
> with most current editors, if not all of them.


On the remote chance that you're not trolling, I deny that 
discoverablity is "infeasible", for editors or other applications. Making 
a UI discoverable is not a hard problem that is difficult to solve. 
Discoverablity isn't radical new concept in UI design, it has been 
around since the 1970s, at least.

The concept is simple: e.g. in the editor I'm using to compose this 
message, I have a toolbar which includes a button "Wrap Text". That's 
discoverable, because even if I didn't know the command existed, I could 
discover it by looking at the toolbar. There's a keyboard command to do 
the same thing: Alt-E-W. Without reading the manual, I'm unlikely to 
discover that command.

Here's a couple of screenshots of Wordstar:

http://www.kantl.be/ctb/vanhoutte/teach/slides/graphics/wstar.gif
http://www.iee.et.tu-dresden.de/~kc-club/08/PCX/WORDSTAR.GIF

Wordstar's commands are discoverable, because they are listed in a menu 
you can choose from. Wordstar dates back to 1978, so this isn't precisely 
the cutting edge of UI design.

As a general rule, menus are discoverable, while keyboard commands 
aren't. There's nothing inherent to text editing functions which makes 
then inherently undiscoverable, and KDE apps like kate and kwrite do a 
reasonable job of making them so.



-- 
Steven