Home Original page

vi or emacs for editing Python on Linux?

Jonathan Gardner jgardn at alumni.washington.edu
Sun Dec 23 06:19:56 EST 2001 
On Saturday 22 December 2001 07:25 am, maxm wrote:
>
> I know this is close to religion. But are there any rational reasons to use
> one instead of the other for Python?
>

Not really. The major difference now is where the keys are on the keyboard. 
With emacs, you usually end up using ctrl-x something, but with Vim, you have 
to get used to different states. As for the missing functionality in Vim, you 
still have it - it's just in other programs in the unix environment. So you 
probably won't be as effective with Vim unless you are in a unix environment 
(basically anything but windows.)

Bottom line: You have to spend at least a week using both editors before you 
can make a good decision. Using either one is a serious undertaking. They 
aren't designed for casual [l]users. They are designed for people who are 
serious about programming and serious about doing it as effectively as 
possible. Whatever you choose, spend a lot of time learning it and committing 
stuff to memory and such.

Jonathan
More information about the Python-list mailing list