[Pythonmac-SIG] Fwd: Preferred IDE

[Chris Barker]

Jeffrey E. Forcier wrote:
>> I also seem to remember BBEdit not having that  
>>issue for some reason, but it wasn't worth the price tag for that  
>>one tweak.

>> TextWrangler/BBEdit is an *excellent* editor, so be sure to try it out yourself

Yes, it is, but it really doesn't do python indenting quite right. These 
days, all python code really should be indented with 4 spaces, and while 
you can set BBedit to put in 4 spaces when you hit the tab key, it 
doesn't recognize those four spaces as a single level of indentation 
when you want to delete them, requiring four hits of the backspace key.

One would think that this is a minor annoyance, and perhaps it is, but 
being used to the excellent [X]emacs python mode, I find it very 
frustrating.

A few years ago, there was a thread in this mailing list about his, and 
someone had even discussed the issue with BB's tech support. Their 
response was something along the lines of "you shouldn't want to do 
that", and they therefor will not try to support it. Granted, I'm sure 
Python coders are a pretty small part of their market, and indentation 
based languages are few and far between, but at the core was an attitude 
that they know better than we do what we should want, and even more of 
an issue, they are in total control of what will and won't be added to 
BBedit. One reason I don't like closed source software. However, besides 
being closed source, BBedit does not provide a powerful way for users to 
  customize the editor's behavior themselves. If they did we'd have an 
excellent python mode by now.

Side note: does anyone know how to do selection, cut and paste by 
columns in BBEdit?

The only reason I like [X]emacs is that it has a full-featured mode for 
every kind of text file I've ever needed to edit, and it has all those 
modes because users could write them. There is no way the core 
development team could ever support everything, and everything well for 
that matter.

I'm still looking for a nice modern, platform independent, general 
purpose, fully customizable (preferably in Python) text editor. SPE is 
heading that way, and Pepper (http://digitalwandering.com/) still has 
promise.

Does anyone know how customizable jedit is .. in Jython maybe?

Sorry for the rant....

-Chris









-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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