[Tutor] What has Editor X got that PyWin32 hasn't?

[Steve Willoughby]

As a meta-comment on this discussion (hopefully to avoid fueling the 
editor holy war further), there's a reason sophisticated editors such as 
vi[m] and EMACS (and a dozen others I could name) exist and remain 
popular so long after they were introduced (which may well have been 
longer ago than some on this list have been alive).  They tend to be 
very, very, very good at doing certain things with text.

Complaints about not liking the style of the interface or standard 
keybindings are understandable, but generally with these sophisticated 
tools, it's possible to completely redefine all of those elements to 
suit your personal style anyway.

However, in my experience, complaints about these editors lacking 
capability or being too awkward to really use effectively generally stem 
from a lack of experience or in-depth knowledge of how to use those 
tools.  I've heard many people say how they can't believe people would 
struggle through using vi when it's so fast and easy to use a mouse and 
easy-to-remember keys and menus, and how much faster they can perform 
their editing operations that way.  And many times when I've worked with 
them on something and fired up vi and started flying all over the 
document changing things, or using the more powerful commands to make 
transformations over the whole text with a few keystrokes, I've heard 
"I... didn't know you could DO that!"  (and I know people who know vi 
much, much better than I do).  Like any complex tool, the time you 
invest in learning how to *really* harness its power will pay off.

Likewise, there's a reason the IDE environments like Visual Studio or 
Eclipse, and pointy-clicky-WYSIWYG editing tools exist.  They're much 
easier for beginners to learn, not as intimidating, but in the end they 
don't pay off with anywhere close to the amount of 
text-document-altering power.  Their payoff is in another arena... 
things like having an IDE write giant chunks of boilerplate code for 
you, or making it easy for people whose editing needs are just to tweak 
a few lines here and there in an existing document (like an 
auto-generated template from the IDE).

They're just tools.  Pick the ones that work for the jobs you need to 
get done, but don't assume that the other ones are pointless.  They may 
either have points you don't need, or you may not have realized their 
importance yet.

--steve