Ide or code editor confusion

[MRAB]

On 2016-07-21 15:07, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 11:56 PM,  <sigmaphine1914 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm learning Python and something is really unclear on the chapter im on.
>>
>> So Python has its own IDE to write code but now it's talking about "code editors"
>>
>> My confusion is so I need a code editor like Sublime text? Is that what Python IDE is for?
>
> You can use any text editor to write your Python code. If you're using
> nothing except Python, IDLE is excellent, but if you work with several
> different languages, you may prefer Sublime, or Atom, or SciTE, or GNU
> Nano, or something else. You can pick up pretty much any text editor
> (not a word processor, and not Windows Notepad, but virtually anything
> else will do) and use that to work on your code.
>
> Without knowing what chapter of what book you're reading, I can't
> advise any further.
>
The key is that the editor should work with "plain text".

A "code editor" is one that works with plain text, but has been designed 
with programming in mind. It will have useful features such as syntax 
colouring (different colours for reserved words, strings, ...), case 
conversion, easy indentation of multiple lines, and so on.