what editor do you use?

[Heather Coppersmith]

A better comparison would be to perform weird editing tasks,
since all editors let you type code at about the same
speed. Example:

One of my friends was trying to cut and paste columnar values in
EMACS. The task took him about five minutes. I showed him JOE's
rectangle selection mode. He was then able to use that feature
to accomplish the same task with (literally) a couple of
keystrokes.

At the risk of starting/entering a holy war, emacs has a
rectangular selection mode.

Perhaps the best test of editors is how productive/useful the help
system is. ;-)

Regards,
Heather (long time emacs user)

 

[Oliver Fromme]

>
> I'll put in a second vote for JOE (though I only have 6 years of Ctrl-K
> commands ingrained in my memory). The recently released JOE 3.0 includes
> syntax coloring support. It's a very simple editor, but does just about
> everything you'd expect from a decent IDE, and then some. If you don't
> like WordStar keys, it'll emulate EMACS and Pico, too.

It's only "simple" on the surface. If you've gone through
your ~/.joerc once, you've noticed that you can configure
it to do quite a lot of things. Using its ability to bind
arbitrary sequences of commands (and even external scripts)
to key combinations, you can configure it to do very complex
tasks.

It doesn't have an automatic de-dent, though. I don't need
it for Python as I use standard tabs, but sometimes I would
like to have that feature for other types of text files.

Regards
Oliver

 

[Steve Lamb]

Of course, there are tasks which will be more efficient in EMACS due to
its scriptability. It all boils down to a question of which editor
provides more practical features.

Yes, I so want to learn Lisp to script my editor for better Python
editing. Whatever was I thinking!?

 

[Christopher T King]

At the risk of starting/entering a holy war, emacs has a
rectangular selection mode.

Perhaps the best test of editors is how productive/useful the help
system is. ;-)

Part of the reason I first started using JOE was because of its simple
help interface: its entire command set is summed up in a few
well-organized help pages that sit at the top of your screen. EMACS's
info-page-within-a-buffer interface is quite confusing for new users.
(Though admittedly, you have to dig through the options menu to find
rectangle selection.)

Perhaps a good way for a newbie to learn EMACS is to start with JOE's
EMACS mode

 

[Mike Rovner]

One of the most useful (for me) features I seek in editor is 'auto word
completion'.
When I type something the editor put the word it thinks I type and I can
accept (by TAB) or ignore it and continue typing.

So far least intrusive (in my way) is FAR internal editor with
autocompletion plugin.

Mike

 

[Lucas Raab]

Nice.

Sticks <[email protected]> wrote in message

The Lord of the Editors or One Emacs to Rule Them All

by Raffael Cavallaro

Knuth's Tex for the Math-kings of sigma, and pi,
Unix vim for the Server-lords with their O'Reilly tomes,
Word for Mortal Men doomed to die,
Emacs from the Bearded One on his Gnu throne,
In the land of Stallman where free software lies.
One Emacs to rule them all. One Emacs to find them,
One Emacs to take commands and to the keystrokes bind them,
In the land of Stallman, where free software lies.

 

[David Cook]

XEmacs. Powerful python mode, error message "hyperlinks", buffer tabs.
There's also python shell that I never seem to use. The downside for me is
that the heavy use of Ctrl and Meta keys can be bothersome on some keyboards
(e.g. Apple Powerbooks with their small and poorly placed Ctrl key).

Dave Cook

 

[Leopold Schwinger]

Currently I use crimson-editor (only for win32)
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

 

[fowlertrainer]

Currently I use crimson-editor (only for win32)
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

I use Context in win32, SciTE in Linux X, joe in Linux console.
Context is working good in Windows, I use for Zope external editor too.

FT

 

[Mike C. Fletcher]

I have a strong Windows background, and am finding this is hurting me
in Linux

Me too. I'm still in the middle of the transition to Linux.

Since I mostly work in Python, my primary need was to find a strong
Python IDE that was fairly close to PythonWin (my windows editor of
choice for Python). So far there are only two competitors left (for me):

* SciTE -- cross platform, fairly robust, simple and fast, but
configuring it to use decent fonts is a PITA (I have never managed
it). Feels much like a kit from which you could build an editor
(almost every other Python editor is built using SciTE's Scintilla
control).
* Eric3 -- provides "intellisense" or whatever you want to call it
(code-completion), tabbed interface, pretty much Win32-friendly
key-bindings (with the exception of Alt-F|eXit not working).
Current version doesn't have drag-and-drop or single-instance
support (I'm planning to hack those in and contribute them back),
but that's about the only significant problem I've encountered so
far. Eric isn't a *lightweight* product like PythonWin (which
starts almost instantly on the same hardware where Eric takes many
wall-clock seconds to start), but it does do just about everything
I need for productive Python hacking on Linux.

Just in case there are other PythonWin lovers out there making the switch,
Mike

________________________________________________
Mike C. Fletcher
Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
http://members.rogers.com/mcfletch/
blog: http://zope.vex.net/~mcfletch/plumbing/

 

[Caleb Hattingh]

i'm new to python and i was wondering what editors people prefer to use
and why.

I have a strong Windows background, and am finding this is hurting me in
Linux

I have checked out almost every free text editor on the Windows platform.
For a substantial time, my favourite was ConText. About 9 months ago I
discovered a text editor called 'syn'. On Windows, this editor has
everything I want in a general-purpose text editor. If you are a windows
user, I *highly* recommend you check this editor out. I use it for LaTeX,
python, objectpascal, FORTRAN, C, VB and others at work.

At home, I am running Mandrake 10. I am struggling to find a text editor
that I can migrate to easily. For example, I think kate is superb (the
code-folding is a godsend), but I would like be able to customize a menu,
or add buttons in order to run shell commands (doing this in syn is
trivially easy). kate has a built-in terminal, but it ain't the same. A
tabbed layout would also be nice, rather than the file-selector.

I know emacs and vi/vim are super-powerful, but significant time is
required (for me, I guess) to learn how to use them effectively.

If someone has had a look at ConText or Syn, and knows of a very similar
text-editor for Linux, I would love to hear about it.

Thanks
Caleb

 

[Scott F]

I know emacs and vi/vim are super-powerful, but significant time is
required (for me, I guess) to learn how to use them effectively.

The time invested in learning one of these is paid back forever in
ongoing efficiency. Other editors have large and often nice feature
sets, but for huge hands-on-the-keyboard power, it's still very hard to
beat vim or emacs (Vim for me).

Scott

 

[Jon Perez]

SciTE is the editor I have been looking for all these
years.

I use it for everything these days (Python, Spyce, PHP,
Java, C#, C/C++, etc...) except when I have to work from
a command line terminal in which case I use vim.

The thing with SciTE is that most of the powerful features
are neatly tucked away until you enable them so it may
look deceptively spartan at first.

Some of the highlights:

* The code folding is superb - it even folds HTML!
* rectangular highlighting is as easy as ALT-mouse drag
* only editor I know of which syntax highlights Javascript,
HTML + PHP or Python simultaneously - in the same file!
* Can call external utilities. I use it with Astyle and
HTML Tidy. One click reformatting of source code.
* No compulsory learning of a whole bunch of convoluted
key-combinations
* powerful regex search and replace
* pretty wide support for syntax-highlighting different
languages (can write your own lexer)
* so much more...

 

[Brian van den Broek]

Jon Perez said unto the world upon 02/07/2004 16:18:

SciTE is the editor I have been looking for all these
years.

I use it for everything these days (Python, Spyce, PHP,
Java, C#, C/C++, etc...) except when I have to work from
a command line terminal in which case I use vim.

The thing with SciTE is that most of the powerful features
are neatly tucked away until you enable them so it may
look deceptively spartan at first.

Some of the highlights:

* The code folding is superb - it even folds HTML!
* rectangular highlighting is as easy as ALT-mouse drag
* only editor I know of which syntax highlights Javascript,
HTML + PHP or Python simultaneously - in the same file!
* Can call external utilities. I use it with Astyle and
HTML Tidy. One click reformatting of source code.
* No compulsory learning of a whole bunch of convoluted
key-combinations
* powerful regex search and replace
* pretty wide support for syntax-highlighting different
languages (can write your own lexer)
* so much more...

<SNIP>

Hi all,

this is about SciTE rather than Python, but I'm hopeful that the [OT]
warning and the recent discussion of SciTE on this thread make that OK.
Apologies if not.

On the strength of a few posts to the now-highjacked thread I grabbed
SciTE. It looks very promising. I know from reading the docs and looking
at the config files that I should be able to configure it so that, when
editing a .py file, F1 opens the Python documentation and passes the word
at the caret as an argument. The problem is I don't know enough to be able
to correctly interpret the docs instructions (I am not a hacker ;-) Could
a SciTE fan tell me what I have to add to my config files?

Many thanks,

Brian vdB

 

[suryaprakash]

I use WingIDE , Best IDE for python saves lots of typing and recalling
effort through its auto completion.

 

[Neil Hodgson]

Brian van den Broek:

On the strength of a few posts to the now-highjacked thread I grabbed
SciTE. It looks very promising. I know from reading the docs and looking
at the config files that I should be able to configure it so that, when
editing a .py file, F1 opens the Python documentation and passes the word
at the caret as an argument. The problem is I don't know enough to be able
to correctly interpret the docs instructions (I am not a hacker ;-) Could
a SciTE fan tell me what I have to add to my config files?

There is a SciTE mailing list at
http://mailman.lyra.org/mailman/listinfo/scite-interest

You can try to set your properties similar (based on where you have
installed Python) to

command.help.*.py=$(CurrentWord)!G:\Python23\Doc\Python23.chm
command.help.subsystem.*.py=4

Most of the time this needs a separate press of the Enter key or
selection from a list of topics after the documenation has been activated.

Neil

 

[Brian van den Broek]

Neil Hodgson said unto the world upon 03/07/2004 05:30:

Brian van den Broek:




There is a SciTE mailing list at
http://mailman.lyra.org/mailman/listinfo/scite-interest

You can try to set your properties similar (based on where you have
installed Python) to

command.help.*.py=$(CurrentWord)!G:\Python23\Doc\Python23.chm
command.help.subsystem.*.py=4

Most of the time this needs a separate press of the Enter key or
selection from a list of topics after the documenation has been activated.

Neil

Thanks Neil, that worked like a charm. (I had tried the elements, but
didn't have the correct grammar for combining them.)

And, assuming that you are the same N. Hodgson, thanks for making SCiTE
available, too!

Best to all,

Brian vdB

 

[Bryan]

Currently I use crimson-editor (only for win32)
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

i also use crimson-editor for everything on win32.

 

[Roy Smith]

i'm new to python

Welcome to the club!

and i was wondering what editors people prefer to use

This is an issue which tends to evoke emotional responses, religious
arguments, and flame wars. Fortunately, I am above all that childish
nonsense and can tell you that emacs is the One True Editor and if you
use anything else you're a vile, demented, cretinous sociopath.

and why.

Because I'm not a vile, demented, cretinous sociopath

Seriously, use whatever editor you like. People use all sorts of
things. Some people don't even use stand-alone text editors, but rather
some kind of IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Perhaps the one
hard and fast requirement is that whatever you pick can be made to
either only use spaces or only use tabs for indenting.

My personal belief is that using all spaces is the way to go. Other
people can make some reasonable arguments why all tabs is better. But
either is certainly better than mixing them, which will give you
incalculable grief. If you DAGS for "tab space indent python" you'll
find enough reading material on the topic to keep you busy for a while.

 

[Roger Binns]

This is an issue which tends to evoke emotional responses, religious
arguments, and flame wars. Fortunately, I am above all that childish
nonsense and can tell you that emacs is the One True Editor and if you
use anything else you're a vile, demented, cretinous sociopath.

You forgot the "x" from the begining of emacs

Roger