best text editor for programming Python on a Mac

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 11:07:23 AM UTC+12, Michael Torrie wrote:
>
> On 06/17/2016 05:52 PM, Chris via Python-list wrote:
>>
>> Any suggestions for a good open source text editor for the Mac out
>> there?  For now, I am going to stick with vim.
> 
> Good choice.

The trouble with vim/vi/whatever, is that it doesn’t work like any other editor on Earth.

Pull up any old GUI-based editor you like, for example Windows (shudder) Notepad. If there are N characters in your file, then the insertion point can be placed at N + 1 positions: in-between two adjacent characters, or before the first character, or after the last character. And this makes sense: anything you type is inserted at the insertion point. All rational text editors (and word processors) work this way.

But not vi/vim. It only lets you place your cursor *on* a character, not *in-between* characters. That’s why you need two separate insertion commands, insert-before and insert-after. And one of those has the interesting side effect where, if you exit insertion mode without inserting anything, it doesn’t put you back in the same position as before. Why?

As to why you need insertion commands at all, that’s another thing...