[Tutor] IDLE vs PythonWin

Alan Gauld alan.gauld at btinternet.com
Mon Feb 2 00:15:10 CET 2009


"Wayne Watson" <sierra_mtnview at sbcglobal.net> wrote

> Hi, sorry, but I have no idea what vim is, 

Yes, its just a text editor that runs in its own window.
Its a very very powerful text editor, one of perhaps 3 or 4 
that are universally used by professional programmers
on any operating system they may need to work with, 
and specifically designed for writing programs.

But you could substitute the name of any text editor.

> I'd still like to know why pythonwin prints almost 
> completely blank pages. 

Me, too, I checked and it works fine for me.
One option is to try a different print driver - it could be a bad 
interface between vim and the printer. But thats unlikely...

> vim=vi(m), linux??

vim = vi improved.
vi was developed by Bill Joy(founder of Sun Microsystems) 
while at university in the late 1970s or very early 80s. It was
desuigned to make it easier to edit programs and take 
advantage of the brand new "glass teletypes" (ie video 
monitors) that weere becoming available. It ran on Unix 
and fast became the standard Unix editor.

Emacs was being built at around the same time on 
Digital computers as a set of macros on top of the Teco 
editor (The name stands for Editining Macros) and when 
these became popular it was turned into a fully fledged 
editor. But because it came from a bunch of Lisp programmers  
it was almost immediately made cross platform and became 
popular across a whole bunch of programmers. And because 
it had a Lisp macro lamnguage it was easy to extend. (A lot 
more than vi!) Both vi and emacs are extremely popular but 
work in almost diametrically opposite ways and so polarise 
opinions. This regularly leads to "Editor wars" between 
programmers on Usenet :-)

Personally I useed both on Unix and liked both. When I moved 
to Windows Emacs couldn't perform all its tricks, whereas 
vi just worked as usual so gradually I stopped using emacs.
Thebn I found vim wjhich added a whole bunch of the "missing" 
features of vi plus full GUI support(mice etc) and vim is now my 
standard editor for serious programming whether it be in Lisp, 
C, Python or HTML.
 
>  I think you may have misunderstood Alan.

Yes, the description below is correct.
I have 3 separate windows open. I use Alt-Tab to cycle 
between them. In both the Python and OS windows I use up/down 
arrow to cycle between previous commands.

>  Then he saves his code in vim and runs the script in the 
> shell (in Ipython you'd use the magic function %run, 

In vim I could use the :! command to run it within vim, 
but I prefer to keep the errors etc plus the previous 
outputs all available in a separate window.

HTH,


-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld



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