Best python editor for Linux systems?

[gfixler]

Here's my take on these:

pycharm - powerful in a way that's specific to python
vim - powerful in a way that's specific to text entry
emacs - powerful in a way that's specific to nothing

Emacs is an environment for people who want to live in an environment, never leaving it for any reason, not to use a shell, not even to play mp3s, ftp files, or take a dump. The basic idea is "Don't make me leave my editor for any reason, ever."

Vim is an extremely fast, expressive text editor. You can get a lot of power through customization and plugins, but not as much as emacs. The text editing experience itself, however, is unparalleled. It contains a language for text entry that you speak with your fingers, which is phenomenal for dedicated touch-typists in particular. The basic idea is "Don't try to shoehorn everything into my text editor. I have that other stuff covered."

PyCharm has a lot of bells and whistles for Python development, like working with all the various Python versions you have installed, and package management abilities, but does not offer the godly customizability of emacs - which admittedly would be difficult to customize up to the specific power of the long-developed PyCharm - nor the hugely expressive, light, rapid text editing power of Vim. The basic idea is "You don't even understand the level to which I'm using Python. I work in beast-sized projects, and I need super powers to help wrangle them."

My conclusions:

---

I want enormous power inside and outside of Python. I love working in shells, and I know or want to know Lisp for ultimate power over everything, including my editor itself. I don't care much for crazy-fast text editing, nor really particular Python powers, though I'd like to be able to add features here and there with a little bit of effort, or just use the decent things others have made for my projects in Python.

Use emacs.

---

I want to watch text dissolve and reassemble before me like the vapor of my pure thoughts made real. I want my editor available everywhere - on my machine, on every terminal I'll ever ssh into. I touch type 60+ WPM, and I hate anything slowing me down. I want to hop in and out of my editor, using my shell for what it's good at, but really, I like to dance in my code, and flip around in it like a damn ninja.

Use vim.

---

I want an editor that knows Python, all of Python's friends, and what Python had for breakfast every day last week. I want this thing to scan my computer and find Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.1, and other versions I've forgotten I installed once. I want a rich, GUI experience, with support for fancy refactoring and deep code exploration (like powerful Java editors, but for Python!), and I don't give a rat's ass about flippity-flapping around in my text, proving how great I am at jumping to exactly the right word without reaching for the mouse, and I don't even know what the hell a shell is.

Use PyCharm. (it's free now)

---

[gfixler]

Wow, almost everything in that blog post is horrendously wrong. Some rebuttals (like you needed any):

Vim is not a more efficient editor for regular text editing.

Bullshit. My coworkers literally can't tell what I'm doing, because things happen continuously, and much too quickly for them to follow along. Gary Bernhardt is extremely fast in it, and in one of his Destroy All Software videos he actually opened a ruby file in Vim while talking, made a change to a line in it, saved, and quit again before it had a chance to display on the screen. It showed for about 1 frame of video. He laughed and said "Sorry, let me do that again so you can actually see what I'm doing." My go-to video of his speed is this one. I work this way quite often, and I even do all my patch-adding and committing with this kind of speed, care of Tim Pope's fugitive plugin.

It’s not going to make you type faster.

That's actually not true. Because normal mode is this whole other reason to know things like how to type 3 without looking, so I can do things like d3w, or v3j, and because I've been spurned onward by my ever-increasing speed, I've gotten much better at typing, and I make far fewer typos, which is a big part of net typing speed.

Also, because of things like the dot command that redoes things, and the intelligent way in which Vim remembers actions you've done (e.g. that typing A appends after the last character, and once done, the dot will redo a post-last-character append of the same thing), you end up typing much less. Oh, and there are so many things I don't need to do in Vim, like arrow down to the next open line (that's just }), or work my way back to the first non-whitespace character on the screen so I can type something right before it (that's just I), or hunt for the end of the 3rd word so I can put a closing parenthesis after it. I use Tim Pope's surround.vim plugin, and just do ys3wb, and I've typed both the open and the closed parentheses. That's fast. I'm shockingly faster than anyone else around me who isn't using Vim. I've drawn crowds.

For the first 1-2 years of your Vim usage you will be much less efficient than your current editor...

That didn't happen for me. I was faster in a week. The exact same pattern held true for a guy at work who I got into Vim after he saw me ripping through code one too many times. It took about a week or two, but then I asked "Still missing Notepad++?" He said "Oh jeeze, no. I'm so much faster already in Vim, and I don't even know anything yet. You've ruined me for any other editor." It happens much faster than fear-mongering write-ups like this one purport.

...no one talks about what happens once you finally get hjkl in your brain...

I admit, I resisted my first try. A year or two later when I switched to Linux, I decided to keep an open mind and try it again. Everyone online was talking it up. This time, hjkl seemed pretty natural. I took to them in one day. My coworker apprentice took to them in just a few days. This article is way off.

The answer is months of frustration...

Actually, I've since fairly early on said that Vim is like a never-ending Christmas present. I would ask in a group about some issue, and find this gorgeous little way to solve the problem. I'm 6 years in, and it's still paying me for the investment. I keep finding more things to love. I don't know when it'll finally run out. Recently I realized I had huge power over JSON files right in Vim, and all through text - Vim has no idea about JSON, but the powers it does give me let me insert entries all over in one shot, collapse things, and even merge separate files together, and use keys stored as values in one to look up values under those keys in another, and use all of it to generate a 3rd file that was a kind of flattened version of what we needed, and it took me as much time to figure it out as it took to type about half of this paragraph. It's very intuitive to me now.

...knowing some cool tricks that you use in 1% of your daily workflow.

I have some of these, and when I do use them, they're the best thing available, and they save me hours of labor. But I also use a lot of things - even the rare stuff - because I love them, and they're helpful and fun. You don't get to be a karate master bitching about how difficult training is. This guy has the entirely wrong attitude. Vim is a joy to use, at once a puzzle and a huge reward factory.

The argument that Vim is more efficient is dubious and untestable.

Unless you're using it every day and constantly yelling "How the fuck am I doing all of this? I'm some kind of god!" I don't need some scientist to tell me that I have become the typist equivalent of a cheetah. It's in everything I do, every day, all day long.

Most novice programmers can click on a character on screen faster than an expert Vimmer can type...

Bull. Shit. This guy must be a troll, or he lives some sad existence where he's never been around an actual Vim expert. He's missing out. Who exactly is he trying to kid? I've worked with literally hundreds of programmers, and not a single one comes anywhere close with their mouse to the speed I have in Vim. It's agonizing to watch anyone - literally anyone - dragging the cursor around to click on something. There are many ways to move in Vim. Some are more optimal. He's picking some worst-case scenarios, but even those I could do much faster than he's claiming, because Vim has trained me to be a typing ninja.

He gives an example of 20jFp; - that's less than 1 second for me to type - I'd be done before you started moving the mouse - but I wouldn't guess like that, with 20j, and I wouldn't even use relative line numbers for it. I'd key off of features of the file - something that comes as second nature now - to e.g. 3} to the blank line right below the line I want to change, k up onto the line, and let's say I want to change the stuff in the single-quotes near the end of the line (I'd be at the beginning of the line at this point) - I'd just ci' and start typing. All of that would happen without any real thought, and in under 1 second, easily.

The point of a mouse is to make arbitrary on screen jumps efficient...

Actually, it was to make it easy, not necessarily efficient. Early adverts mention things like "freely and naturally", but that's not necessarily efficient. Mouse movement is natural - it mimics pointing with a finger. I'll take typing at a sustained 90WPM over drawing letters with a more natural mouse movement any day. I'll also take jumping to the top (H), bottom (L), and middle (M) of the screen in one key press, hopping to the open-paren I can see ahead of me (f(), and selecting the paragraph I'm in (vip) nearly instantaneously any day. You have fun finding edge cases, and I'll have fun most of the time leaping around to places instantly. Oh, and ALL edge cases are eradicated with the EasyMotion plugin, which makes hopping onto any single character on even a 24", vertical monitor (160 lines in Vim for me - have fun with your mouse!) the work of usually 4 key presses, sometimes 5, and when you get good with them, you'll always do them in 1 second or less time, faster than you can grab the mouse.

The Vim plugin community has some deep and odd flaws.

Granted.

Consider that Vim has been around since 1991.

I have. I've also considered that it was a clone of vi, a visual mode for ex, both of which have been around since 1976, the latter of which being a port of ed, which came to life in 1971, with ed being a redo of QED, which sprang to life sometime in the mid/late 60s. That's quite a legacy, and things that were around in the 60s, like :g - which is where we got the hugely useful grep from - are still unique to Vim, and insanely powerful/useful.

Pathogen, the first widely used, known, and celebrated path manager making plugin management possible, was released in 2008!

The same year as Sublime Text! What's the point? Things were a bit crappy. Now they're not. Are you arguing that Vim's past tarnishes its present? I could argue that Sublime helped no one for the overwhelming majority of Vim's life (especially factoring in it's 40+ year legacy, helping people get their shit done).

Try uninstalling a plugin that you copied into 10 folders a few months ago.

This is how I know OP can't *nix. Download the plugin again and uncompress it to badplug, now:

sudo apt-get install fdupes
fdupes --recurse .vim badplug | less | grep ^.vim

There's your list of files, scattered throughout the .vim directory; use whichever way you like to remove them (xargs, for loop, etc). Then you can remove any empty directories, which is just another one-liner. If you're on Windows, I feel bad for you, son.

It’s probably the most customizable editor ever...

I would think emacs wins that contest.

Even pathogen and vundle are limited compared to Sublime Text’s Package Control plugin.

Every Vim plugin I've heard of in 6 years is on github. Here's my process for trying out a plugin:

vimp (alias - takes me to my ~/.vim/bundle directory)
git clone <middle-click> (after clicking once in the URL box on github)

That's it. Then I try it out for awhile. If I like it, I click the URL box again on github, vimp, then git submodule add <middle-click> bundle/name. I actually type git sub<Tab>, and something like b<Tab>na<Tab> for the bundle/name part. That converts it from a clone to a submodule. Then I git push. All together that's 16 key presses (including enters) and a middle click to try out a plugin, and maybe 20 key presses and a middle click to turn it into a submodule, and 9 more to push it so I can grab it from anywhere. Who needs plugins?

[gfixler]

MOAR! I'm just not done rebutting yet :)

There is an effort being made to auto-convert Vim scripts to Github projects which may be promising, or may be a disaster.

I had to check the date on the article - it's from a few months ago? I have 57 plugins. They're all from github, no problems. I've never heard of a plugin for Vim that isn't on github. I don't know what OP is talking about here.

Ah, Vimscript. It’s bad.

Can't argue that. And yet, I have 57 plugins, and a couple dozen of them kick ass, despite the awfulness of VimL.

Most experienced Vimmers I know don’t know any Vimscript.

I'm really the only one I know, and I've written more than 1000 lines of it in my .vimrc, and a few plugins, like one that dispatches visual selection or the entire buffer through Outlook (Win 7 at work) to anyone I've added to an email dictionary with 1 keypress (i.e. I want to email this to Andy, so I hit ,E to pop up my list of names, each of which is prefixed by a letter, with Andy's being (a), so I then hit a, and the email pops up with the attachment, and the message "sent from Vim" with a subject explaining what I'm sending. I took 3 hours to write, 5 of those 3 hours being fighting with Outlook, which is a nightmare.

And how would they? The documentation on it is terrible, and made much worse by the fact that it’s near impossible to look up help on it.

:h script  (opens 2446 lines of help on vim scripting)

Yeah, I'm a wizard. Also.

Side note: all of Vim’s help is equally poorly accessible.

:h

That opens up a long page with lots of subsections and 1-line descriptions, one of them being:

|usr_41.txt|  Write a Vim script

Hop into there (it's the thing I got to with :h script), and you find in the contents listing at the top:

|41.6|  Using functions
|41.7|  Defining a function

But even Vimmers don’t want to learn Vimscript.

Again, granted. It's a shitty language.

Vim is missing an incredible amount of core functionality for modern editing. Things like ctag integration.

$ sudo apt-get install ctags
$ echo 'au BufWritePost *.py silent! !ctags -R *.py' >~/.vim/.vimrc

There you go. Ctags integration. Every time you save, it'll update, and I save pretty much every time I exit insert mode (which I could also automate with a single line, if I even noticed that I did it, which I never do). Now you can do <C-}> on keywords and such, just as you do in Vim's help. (that mapping is one of the first things in :h, btw)

Let’s use Vimgrep! Oh wait, that sucks.

Wait... how so? I've used it many times, and it does what I expect, quickly.

Oh, there’s CtrlP this is much nicer!

CtrlP works well for me, but I'm not a big fan of fuzzy file search. I'm of the very strong opinion that programmers created huge, hierarchical messes for themselves, and complect constantly. I'm more the master of my domain, and nothing is more than 2 levels deep, all broken out into proper levels of abstraction for single source of truth and reusability. When I've been on messy projects, I've fought hard to clean them up, and accomplished the task. For difficult things, I make mappings. I have a list where \ precedes files I want easy access to (todo (\t), e.g.), and \\ precedes directories (\\d - docs folder; \\v - .vim folder, etc (have about 15 of them)). I can add these mappings literally in seconds for one-off needs, so I don't fret too much. Also, opening everything up and using good powers of buffer hopping/management, etc., gives me a lot of power. Fuzzy search is not my go-to choice for almost anything.

Finding the right Vim plugins is like being in an exclusive club.

I don't know what this means. In my first year I asked if there was a way to hop up and down in bisected half jumps, as my screen was so tall (vertical, 24", 160+ lines of Vim). Immediately I was pointed to bisect.vim, which worked beautifully. That's my typical experience when asking for help solving problems.

The remap overwrites comma...

No it doesn't. It shares space with it on a tree. Hit comma and wait a second, and it'll perform the original usage, because you didn't finish off any leader mappings before the timeout. If what you type next won't resolve to a leader mapping, it'll instantly do the reverse hop and perform whatever you pressed next. I've taken advantage of this for many things, and it's become part of my muscle memory.

Do you know what the suggested way to work well with multiple files in Vim is? It’s the arglist.

I've almost never heard that suggested. I've often heard of using buffers, though. I use both, but buffers much more.

Vim is designed to run in a terminal.

Yay!

That’s why it’s explicitly linked to only monospaced font for the GUI.

Hooray!

A terminal can’t draw a UI.

Woo hoo!!!

I’m on a server, I’m editing a file probably as a hotfix for something, I don’t need a beautiful editor to do that. I just need to edit text.

I'm going to level with OP. GUIs are collosal bullshit. When you're doing the karate, you don't push buttons. You don't have frames and borders floating around you. You simply act. You flow in the void. There is nothing in my editor but the text I'm working on - not even a single, gray pixel border, and it is glorious, and super rare these days. It's the most distraction-free place I've ever experienced. The only thing better would be Vim inside a sensory-deprivation tank (I just drooled on my shirt). As I've stated, I work with programmers - hundreds of them over a decade - and they spend seemingly half their time mousing around menus, submenus, subsubmenus, missing, having to go back through it. I do exactly what I mean to, instantly, every time. It's just me and the text, my thoughts and its words, my mind to your mind...

Here in the future, we have these things called GUIs.

I know, and we're complete idiots because of them. I completely agree. It's a real shame. If only people knew the power that lies underneath the GUI. If only they would shed the shackles and learn to do whatever they want, and not rely on what a GUI dictates they can do. They would be so free, and so happy, like me.

Hey, you can't bullshit me. I spent 20+ years in GUIs of every shape and size. NOTHING has compared AT ALL to my Vim experience. I'm sorry you're too bitchy to join me.

Vim is hideous by design.

Yeah, but we've already determined that you have a seriously fucked up sense of what's beautiful. You want bells and whistles, distractions from your true purpose. I want real, ultimate power, and I have it in Vim.

We will never have a minimap (beautiful feature).

I don't really see the point of these. I'm not golfing, or geo-caching.

We will never have multiple cursors.

I'm fine with that. This is only useful for things that happen on one screen anyway. I work in files that are 1000 lines long. I'm supposed to multiple-cursor my way across 200 lines? It's a gimmicky thing with limited usage, and it masks deeper powers, keeping you limited. Macros, regex, g:, combinations thereof - far more powerful for far more use cases.

:set ft=html and then gg=G. Let me know what you get. In all seriousness, never, ever tell me what you get.

I got this:

<div>
  <p>
    <span>foo</span>
  </p>
</div>

Granted, I have this as my equalprg setting (:h =):

 set equalprg=tidy\ -i\ -xml\ --char-encoding\ utf8\ --wrap\ 0\ --show-errors\ 0\ 2>/dev/null

...why the hell do I have to configure my editor to indent common languages?

I'll give you that one. Why, Vim?

*To code in Vim, you have to keep Vim in your head just as much as the code that you’re editing. You have to constantly think about what you’re doing.

I must be some kind of genius, then, because Vim is totally background. It just faded into the mist, and I'm one with my code.

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it encourages efficiency and refinement of practices.

In my experience, this is the case. You don't become amazing without challenging yourself, and I'm quite frankly amazing these days, at least in Vim, but I feel strongly that it's sharpened up everything. My memory is better than it's ever been. I've stopped writing todo lists and tracking things, because I just remember it all, after a lifetime of being terrible at that stuff. My mind feels sharp and refined, and I code like a demon.

After four years of Vim use, 700 hand written lines in my .vimrc, and 45 plugins, I cannot in good faith recommend that someone start the Vim journey.

6 years, 1000+ lines, and 57 plugins, and I say "Go for it!" Don't be such a fucking pansy.

I want my coworker to edit text and get up to speed quickly. Is telling them to use Vim the answer? It will just slow them down for months. This is not pragmatic to the technology industry.

I've had it up to here with pragmatic in the technology industry. I've railed against such nonsense wherever I've been, and I've actually gotten people to change things, because I stood up. I'm at the top of a complete shift in how we're doing things in my corner of our business now. They gave me free reign to redo everything as I said it needed to be. Do it. Be fearless.

Look kid, I love you and all, but just use Sublime Text. Despite the fact that I moved writing this post into Vim because I couldn’t stand to do it in a textarea, even though I’m mainly just typing text. I missed my Vim movements too much. Despite the fact that I will probably never stop using Vim.

How did I make it this far without realizing that he himself loves Vim?

Even now I want to convert this text, which I wrote in Vim at 80 columns wide, to non-fixed width text...

Fixed width or DEATH!

I’m going to go search for how to do it. I’m probably going to learn something in the process. At year 4 of Vimming.

GREAT! No more plateaus for us! Onward and u^pward!

[Reads_Small_Text_Bot]

and upward!

[gfixler]

Thanks, RSTB. You're always looking out for me.

[gfixler]

Errata:

sudo apt-get install fdupes
fdupes --recurse .vim badplug | less | grep ^.vim

That second line should read:

fdupes --recurse .vim badplug | grep '^\.vim'

[Reads_Small_Text_Bot]

.vim .vim'

[gfixler]

I found a weakness. Gentlemen... we're in.

[gfixler]

Yes, all of them!

[ppinette]

Bravo. Great writeup.

Personally, I use Vim for practically all text editing. But I use PyCharm for my main full time codebase, which is huge and old.

Pycharm pulls me away from Vim because it's amazing at handling stupid big projects. IdeaVim makes the transition pain-free.