Best Python editor (under Linux)

[Bengt Richter]

On Fri, 03 Jan 2003 19:09:08 -0000, Steve Lamb <grey at despair.dmiyu.org> wrote:

>On Fri, 03 Jan 2003 19:23:23 +0100, Martin Christensen
><knightsofspamalot-factotum at gvdnet.dk> wrote:
>> What's more interesting, it looks like the vi camp is starting to chase
>> Emacs, because the things that are being implemented for Vim is exactly what
>> we've been doing all along for Emacs. Ironic, isn't it?
>
>    I doubt we'll ever see a newsreader and email client in vim's scripting
>lanuage.  BTW, pick one.  It has four that I am aware of and three of them are
>discussed here heavilty.  Perl, Python and Ruby.  As I said before, it is the
>penchant for craming everything and the kitchen sink into the editor which has
>no business being there.

Maybe a different concept of the "craming" would help. IOW, ISTM letting
"everything and and the kitchen sink" be accessible through an editor interface
interface does not contitute "craming" those things into the editor.

News readers and email clients have to be written with a lot text manipulation
features that have much in common with primitives used in writing editors, so if
you wanted to write a full-featured and extensible news reader or email client,
what route would you take?

Suppose there were a Python module called tme.py which you could import and get
all kinds of handy classes for holding chunks of text and methods for manipulating
them, and tapping into file objects as sources and sinks, etc., etc., would you
not tend to use that for your news reader or email client project?
I'll assume you would ;-)

Ok, now suppose tme.py when run as a program started an interactive shell that
presented a nicely featured editor, which happened to have some simple editing
features you wanted for composing email or news posts, etc., so the basic
composition problem was solved. Would you build on this interface? Or would you
insist on writing your own and just importing tme for its text manipulation engine
(tme ;-) capabilities? If it happened to be easier to arrive at the interface you
wanted by scripted modifications of the tme.py editor interface, and you did that,
how would you describe what you did to implement your project using tme.py? Would
it be intelligent reuse or editor abuse? If the next distribution of tme.py included
tme_newsread.py that could be started through tme.py's normal default editor startup
interface, would that be "craming" a newsreader "into" tme.py?

It you think of emacs and vim conceptually like the imaginary (?) tme.py I just
conjured, does that modify your thoughts on "craming" stuff "into" them?

BTW, FWIW, I cut my editing teeth on TECO, but I tend to use vim (or vi for non-gui) lately,
unless I'm using the builtin for MSVC++6's IDE (which (the IDE) is hard to beat for stepping
through code). I guess I will have to move to emacs for real geek creds though ;-)

Regards,
Bengt Richter