New to python, do I need an IDE or is vim still good enough?

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 7:01 AM, mogul <morten.guldager at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do I really need a real IDE, as the windows guys around me say I do, or will vim, git, make and other standalone tools make it the next 20 years too for me?

Welcome!

No, you don't *need* an IDE. Some people like them and are the more
productive for them, but if standalone tools have served you well for
20 years, they'll continue to do so. My current editor is SciTE,
because it supports all the languages I use (except LilyPond - must
look into that one day) and is available on Windows as well (I support
both platforms), but there are plenty of other excellent editors, and
vim is definitely one of them.

When I'm on Windows, I like to keep IDLE handy, but not for editing
source files. IDLE feels much nicer than command-line Python for
interactive work; the ability to recall entire blocks of code, rather
than individual lines, is hugely advantageous. (I don't do enough on
Linux IDLE to be able to call the difference there, but GNU readline
is so much better than the Windows interactive line reader that it's
not as big an issue.) To me, IDLE is my calculator, my test space for
python-list posts, and so on, but SciTE is where I write actual code.

ChrisA