On Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:47:36 +1100, Ben Finney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Steve Phillips" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> I am just wondering what seems to be the most popular IDE. The >> reason I ask is I am currently at war with myself when it comes to >> IDE's. It seems like every one I find and try out has something in >> it that others don't and viceversa. > > This speaks to the twin facts that people want different things, and > that Python is flexible enough to accommodate these differing desires. > >> I am in search for the perfect IDE > > Perfect for whom, exactly? Perfect for what, exactly? > > These are not facetious questions: they cut to the core of your quest. > I am convinced that your quest for a development environment that is > ?integrated? (or ?tightly-coupled?, in programming terminology) is > incompatible with any useful criterion of ?perfect?. > > Instead, I find the greater gain comes from a working environment of > *loosely-coupled* tools, with standard well-defined interfaces, that > one can flexibly mold and reconnect to meet whatever task is at hand. > The deeper this extends into the operating system, the more the system > as a whole will be able to support this flexibility, and the more > likely the tools will have been designed to do so. > > Because of the inescapable central role in our craft of manipulating > text files, essential in this development environment is a > highly-customisable text editor with a broad *and* deep library of > existing customisations, to maximise the amount of work already done > for you when embarking on work in an area that is, to you, new. > > It happens that the text editors which meet these criteria are limited > to Emacs and Vim, with a sharp decline in suitability (by these > criteria) beyond those two. Both have powerful user-customisable > capabilities and a mammoth availability of existing extensions for a > staggering variety of tasks. Learn one of these editors well, > familiarise yourself with how to access the rich library of available > extensions, and make the text editor the core of your loosely-coupled > development environment.
You think like I think, but I think your standards are too high. I like claiming "my IDE is Emacs and Unix", but in fact I know very little about how to customize Emacs using elisp -- I have added a few keyboard shortcuts, made it use a readable font, and disabled a few silly features, but that's about it. I use a Unix shell on the side to do the non-editing tasks which I guess you train your editor to do. So, my requirements on the editor boils down to: - free and universally available - will still be around when I'm dead - capable as a pure text editor - support for colorizing Python code (at least strings and comments) - helps me indenting Python code - support for other languages I hope many editors fulfill those criteria, except maybe the first two. /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu \X/ snipabacken.se> R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
