[Tutor] Best Python Editor

Michael Powe michael at trollope.org
Mon Jun 15 04:31:53 CEST 2009


On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 12:53:19PM -0700, Emile van Sebille wrote:

> On 6/14/2009 8:04 AM Alan Gauld said...
> >"Tom Green" <xchimeras at gmail.com> wrote

> >>Since VIM seems to be the editor of choice and I have been programming in
> >>Python for many years using Pyscripter and Eclipse I was wondering how I
> >>could transition away from the IDE world to VIM.

> >With great difficulty and to be honest I wouyldn't bother.
> >If you are used to eclipse then there is little to be gained from moving 
> >to vim.

> Seconded.  Editors are a personal choice and often the loss of 
> productivity while learning a new environment isn't worth it.  My 
> introduction to coding Turbo Pascal was eased owing to the WordStar 
> compatible/modeled editor it used.  Nowadays, any editor with 
> configurable syntax capability is sufficient.  It's all personal 
> preference after that.

It's good to see so much common sense prevailing on this topic.  An
IDE such as eclipse or VS really only becomes a necessity for
productivity when (a) you are dealing with multiple code files and
proper compilation and linking and so forth becomes complicated; or
(b) you are working in a language with which you are not as familiar
as you should like to be, and autocompletion because a real asset.

However, I will say that while following this thread, it occurred to
me that the one feature that VS and even the VBA editor in MS Office
has, is the ability to pop you into the debugger on error.  This
feature is so useful that it surprises me nobody else seems to do it.
Most often, simply the ability to jump to the error line is provided
and I suppose that must be generally acceptable.

Thanks.

mp


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