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Is there any editor support python?

Neil Hodgson nhodgson at bigpond.net.au
Thu Aug 30 07:29:34 EDT 2001 
Alex Martelli:

> But although I use VIM for most of my editing, my
> vote as most-amazing-editor goes to SciTE, see
> http://www.scintilla.org/.  The most amazing thing
> about it is http://www.scintilla.org/Sc1.exe.  It's
> just 200K to download (vs a few megabytes for VIM
> and many megabytes for Emacs) as a stand-alone
> Windows executable

   Sc1.exe cheats a little by using the UPX compressor - many people don't
like this because it uses up more RAM than the same program as an
uncompressed EXE due to the way that demand paging of normal EXEs means they
do not need to have all code loaded into RAM and the images are shared
between processes. I like Sc1 for the simplicity of a single download but
most users will want to have the properties files separate so they can be
tweaked.

> -- and that single little .exe
> file is a complete editor that knows about umpteen
> languages INCLUDING not just colorization, auto-
> indent, folding, etc, but ALSO the ability to run
> (or compile, etc, depending on the programming
> language you're using) the stuff you're editing
> in another pane.  The author, Neil Hodgson, and
> the dozens of contributors, have really done a
> SWELL job!!!  The only thing that doesn't work in
> the 200K Sc1.Exe is Help (F1) -- I guess the help
> file just didn't fit:-)

   The documentation should make this a bit more explicit. SciTE's help
command is not for generic help about SciTE (which would be a good feature
to add) but for context-sensitive help for the language of the current file.
To set this up with ActivePython's help files, the following properties can
be used:

if PLAT_WIN
  command.help.*.py=$(CurrentWord)!C:\Python21\Documentation\Python.chm
  command.help.subsystem.*.py=4

 Watch for line wrap on the command.help.*.py line and use the right path to
find your installation of ActivePython documentation. Once this is set up,
pressing F1 while the caret is within a word (such as a module, function or
method) will display help with the index positioned on that word if there is
help available for it. You can also use other help systems such as running
WinHelp, a browser or man on linux.

   While Sc1 has a reasonable set of properties baked in, the location of
documentation varies too much so use Options | Open Global Options File,
SciTE will complain that the file doesn't exist yet which is cool, add the
options and save. This creates a SciTEGlobal.properties file in the same
directory as Sc1.exe and these options will override baked in properties.

   Neil
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