[Pythonmac-SIG] Editors (was Mac IDLE Fonts?...)

[Russell E Owen]

At 4:32 PM -0700 2008-07-17, Christopher Barker wrote:
>Russell E. Owen wrote:
>>Another option is to use a normal text editor* You lose some 
>>interactivity but the powerful editing features may compensate by 
>>increasing productivity in other ways.
>...
>>I'm still looking  for a modern replacement that I like as well.
>
>Check out Peppy:
>
>http://peppy.flipturn.org/
>
>It's not totally mature yet, but it's under active development:
>
>http://groups.google.com/group/peppy-dev?hl=en
>
>and definitely headed in the right direction.
>
>It'd be great to get some more Mac users on board...

I just gave it a quick try. It's a nice start. It certainly shows off 
wxPython nicely.

Two things I noticed right off (which I'll report if you think they 
aren't known already):
- If a command key is not recognized then the corresponding letter is 
entered. That is bad. (For instance cmd-w enters a w!).
- Lots of these message when I did some selecting:
CGContextRestoreGState: invalid context
this may be due to using too old of wx, I suppose.

Also the Find is fine for simple finding, but what do you do for more 
serious work? I am pretty sure I'd want a real dialog box, or at 
least visible easily-modified controls, for options such as: "in 
selection", "whole word", "case sensitive". Unfortunately the lack of 
that seems to be a conscious design decision, so I have no idea if 
that's negotiable, much less fixable.

In the long run I'd want find/replace in multiple files, but 
presumably it's too alpha for that.


Another editor to look at is Eddie. It is lean and fast and gets a 
lot of the basics right. Unfortunately:
- No tabbed windows
- No user macros
- It has a bug highlighting triple-quoted strings.
- Some of its tools are only for C/C++

So far SubEthaEdit is the most well-rounded alternative to Pepper 
I've found, but I finally gave up on it and went back to Pepper. I'm 
hoping that a version of TextMate will eventually come out with more 
usable undo. If not I may have to learn emacs.

-- Russell