[Pythonmac-SIG] FAQ item

[Bob Ippolito]

On Tuesday, Jul 29, 2003, at 13:18 America/New_York, Glenn Andreas 
wrote:

> At 10:00 AM -0700 7/29/03, Israel C. Evans wrote:
>> I would love for the PythonIDE to have Syntax coloring..
>> The lack of it was the only reason I started down the long path 
>> towards becoming familiar with emacs.
>>
>> The IDE didn't have syntax coloring, Pythoncard's editor while 
>> wonderful was also quite unstable on my machine for some reason, so I 
>> eventually found my way to Jedit which is also amazing, but with 
>> large files became extremely slow.  Since I could never get my head 
>> around the mode switching of Vi and Vim, I set down to learn emacs. 
>> Now I'm quite comfortable with it, but I've had to give up the 
>> wonderful popups that appear when I'm typing a class or a function 
>> that is part of python or has been created in the file as Code Editor 
>> or Idle does.  And I don't get the nice integration of the python 
>> documentation and such, but at least it works and gives my code 
>> pretty colors.
>>
>> It's amazing to me that with all the wonderful benefits that the 
>> PythonIDE offers, I'm uncomfortable using it just because my code 
>> doesn't come in full color.  I think I must be terribly spoiled.
>
> PyOXIDE does syntax coloring (and the next version should work 
> correcty with 2.3), but it doesn't have the debugger that PythonIDE 
> does (yet - it will soon though).  It is, however, making extremely 
> good progress (last night I added a simple module help/documentation 
> window that uses pydoc) - it is really amazing how powerful Python + 
> PyObjC + Cocoa really is.

No kidding, you'd have to offer me some serious cookies to do any real 
GUI development in Carbon, win32api, etc. after getting used to Cocoa.  
It would be even nicer if Apple would expose more of Project Builder to 
the rest of us (i.e. let us make our own SCM plugins, debugger 
wrappers, etc), then we wouldn't need to have four or five python IDEs 
on the mac when most of us use Vim or Emacs anyway ;)

-bob