[Tutor] While learning Py: To IDE or not to IDE?

[boB Stepp]

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Brian van den Broek
<brian.van.den.broek at gmail.com> wrote:

> These are close to religious questions :-)
>
> With you polyglot agenda, I would say you would be much better off to learn
> a powerful multipurpose editor well than to try to find the best of breed of
> each class of special purpose tool.
>
> There are three basic choice: emacs, vi or vim, and everything else. There
> is widespread, though not uniform, consensus that The One True Editor is one
> of emacs and vi. After that, the rest is flamewars.
>
> I am an emacist, myself. But some of my best friends are vimists.

I gather, then, that you feel my time would be well-spent now to learn
a good editor/IDE now, rather than continue with IDLE?

I did not intend to start a holy war on the best editor/IDE with my
questions! ~(:>))

But since you brought it up, I'll ask a somewhat more general
question: Why do you prefer an editor instead of a graphical IDE? I
have limited experience with Emacs as I finally installed it on my PC
at work to avoid having Windows-style end-of-line characters messing
up my scripts which were to run in an UNIX environment. I can see
potential there, but as my future projects get larger and more
involved will it be able to do everything I would want it to do? Would
I find myself wanting a full-fledged IDE? I don't have enough
technical knowledge to answer these questions right now. Your
thoughts?

Cheers!
boB