Feedback welcome!

[Neil Hodgson]

   Hi David,

> The head developer and owner of our company responds to user feedback
> so naturally the loudest communties get what they want while the rest
> don't. I've been a fan of Python and I am very much interested in
> developing an editor with Python and Python developers in mind but I
> can't convince my boss to include Pyhon in our future plans if he
> doesn't hear from the community itself. Even the Ruby community in
> Japan makes itself heard!

   While the Python community has put quite a bit of effort into building
editors ourselves, there are still plenty of opportunities for a company to
compete with these free efforts. Studying the existing open-source Python
editors and integrated development environments will show the sorts of
features we find valuable. Much Python software is licensed under conditions
that allow inclusion in proprietary products, so many of the features could
be incorporated into your product either by direct copying if they are
implemented in the same language as your product or by translation.

   The feature that I find of most importance when comparing products is
implementation quality. I'll gladly pay for commercial software when that
software has a similar feature set but fewer bugs and faster performance
than free software.

   One feature that should receive more emphasis in editors is integrating
with code auditing tools such as Python's PyChecker
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pychecker/). As a first step, it should be
possible to run PyChecker over a Python source file and have the code that
fails audit highlighted in a similar way to spelling/grammar errors in
Microsoft Word with coloured underlines. As a further step, PyChecker should
be run continuously in the background highlighting errors as soon as they
occur. This sort of feature is not just useful for Python - HTML can be
checked with various validity and compliance tools.

   Neil (lead developer of Scintilla/SciTE)