best text editor for programming Python on a Mac

Joel Goldstick joel.goldstick at gmail.com
Sat Jun 18 20:26:36 EDT 2016


On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 8:12 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro
<lawrencedo99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

I personally love vim.  But its clearly an acquired taste.  When you
get good at it its pretty amazing -- and no mouse.  The other thing
about vim is that it is on every linux system, so you don't have to
load your editor if you are ssh-ing to some machine

-- 
Joel Goldstick
http://joelgoldstick.com/blog
http://cc-baseballstats.info/stats/birthdays



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