This article was written with Emacs everything I finish is written using Emacs. In short, to be effective, Emacs must be a way of life - but it's a good life if you stick to it. And once you've learned to use it, you can use it to do It does, however, have a tutorial built in - read the opening screen carefully to see how to open it - and there's much more documentation accessible on the fly, once you've learned to use it. Its model of text is different than anything you're used to, its keyboard shortcuts are nothing like today's de facto standard, and its look and feel is straight out of 1985. The downside of Emacs is its insane learning curve. Pymacs package, you can even use Python to extend Emacs itself, though I don't recommend it if you think your extensions might ever be useful to anyone else. There are also several packages for integrating unit testing, virtualenv, pylint, on-the-fly error indication, and more. With the addition ofĪnything-ipython, available using the package manager, powerful syntax completion is easily available, including any modules that you import. Python has not been neglected by Emacs extenders python-mode is included in the base distribution, which allows editing of Python code with syntax highlighting automatic indentation descriptions of keywords, modules, classes, and more on the fly snippet insertion an interactive Python REPL in a split window with the ability to do partial recompilation code folding and more. Emacs is huge for a text editor, but it has been called an operating system for a reason. Emacs has modes for every major programming language and most minor ones it can serve as a newsreader, an email client, a web browser, terminal emulator, image viewer, and blogging client it has a package manager, Bible-study tools, a web server - you begin to see the point. Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Haiku, Minix, Android - more or less everywhere.Įmacs' claim to fame is its extensibility, which has allowed its users to create editing modes for almost everything, really. There have been other Emacsen, including Gosling Emacs and most prominently XEmacs, but they have all been mostly supplanted by GNU Emacs. Emacs is not really a single text editor it's more a family of text editors that is almost 40 years old, starting with TECO EMACS, which was a set of text-editing macros implemented by Richard Stallman using the TECO editor/programming language, and continuing to be developed today with GNU Emacs, also created by Stallman.

Python text editor programs