[Tutor] OT: Vim was: free IDE for Python?

[Alan Gauld]

>>   I've used vim in the past for python and recommend it for ease of
>>   use and support. 
> 
> I have to chuckle when you recommend Vim for ease of use. 

Me too, and I've been a vi/elvis/viper/vim user for over 20 years(*).
vi/vim could never be described as easy to learn, but...

... ease of use can mean ease of use once you have learned it. 
ie efficient. Now vim passes that test with flying colours. The 
guys who designed vi (Bill Joy the founder of Sun Microsystems 
was one of them) took the view that it should be easy for experts 
not novices since most programmers would rapidly progress 
beyond novice.

One of the great features of vim is that once you grasp its 
design philosophy it is entirely consistent and you can often 
guess new commands without looking it up in the help.

For those who want a tutorial that teaches the underlying vi 
philospohy as well as the basic commands I strongly recommend 
the vilearn package (sometimes called teachvi). It is a bash 
script so you need a bash shell to install it but GNU or 
cygwin bash will work on Windows. Its not pretty but its 
short and it  works:

http://www.houseofthud.com/vilearn.html

(*) And I've been an emacs user for equally long, I like and use 
both for different things...

Alan G.