[Tutor] While learning Py: To IDE or not to IDE?

[Brian van den Broek]

On 21 May 2012 01:19, "boB Stepp" <robertvstepp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Brian van den Broek
> <brian.van.den.broek at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> > With you polyglot agenda, I would say you would be much better off to
learn
> > a powerful multipurpose editor well than to try to find the best of
breed of
> > each class of special purpose tool.
> >
> > There are three basic choice: emacs, vi or vim, and everything else.
There
> > is widespread, though not uniform, consensus that The One True Editor
is one
> > of emacs and vi. After that, the rest is flamewars.
> >
> > I am an emacist, myself. But some of my best friends are vimists.
>
> I gather, then, that you feel my time would be well-spent now to learn
> a good editor/IDE now, rather than continue with IDLE?

<snip>

> But since you brought it up, I'll ask a somewhat more general
> question: Why do you prefer an editor instead of a graphical IDE? I
> have limited experience with Emacs as I finally installed it on my PC
> at work to avoid having Windows-style end-of-line characters messing
> up my scripts which were to run in an UNIX environment. I can see
> potential there, but as my future projects get larger and more
> involved will it be able to do everything I would want it to do? Would
> I find myself wanting a full-fledged IDE? I don't have enough
> technical knowledge to answer these questions right now. Your
> thoughts?

Hi boB,

If IDLE is working well for you, there's a good reason to stick with it.

I meant to address whether you ought build a stable of purpose-specific
IDEs or learn one editor to rule them all.

The advantage of emacs, as I see it, is that it provides general purpose
tools of high power for text-wrangling and the (non-trivial) time you have
to invest to learn to exploit that power yields fruit whenever you are
editing text. Emacs key bindings turn on all over the place, too; bash
shell supports a bunch, for instance.

It might be that editor plus language would be frustrating to try to learn
all at once, though.

Best,

Brian vdB
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