The thing that nudged me into trying VIM was the book, The Pragmatic Programmer. It mentioned Emacs and VIM and the value of learning a powerful editor and sticking with it. I had tried Emacs three times long ago, and it didn't click with me. I decided to try VIM, and it made a lot more sense to me. Yep, there's a steep learning curve. I learned a lot of the basic command in a day or so, then gradually learned more and more. I'm always finding something new about it. There's tons of scripts, plug-ins, and tips at the vim.org site.
A couple of important things to me are: Cross platform: I work with Windows, Linux, VMS, and Mac Works with mulitple languages: I write Python, Perl, XHTML/HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, COBOL, DCL, and occasionally VBScript. I will point out that both Emacs and VIM do their best to keep your hands on the keyboard which supposedly keeps you more productive since you don't have to waste time grabbing the mouse to perform many tasks. That philosophy is alien to many people and does take some getting used to. I think both of these editors have their roots in the pre-mouse days. http://brianray.chipy.org//Python/pythonandvim.html has a blog about VIM with Python built in. You can script VIM with Python. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=910 is a script that allows you to use PyDoc from within VIM, so you can look up documentation on modules while coding. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=850 pydiction is a special dictionary file of Python modules for use with vim's completion feature. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=127 is a plug in for running Python scripts from within VIM. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1096 allows you to run PyChecker from within VIM. Code folding, auto indentation, syntax highlighting are standard features in VIM. Anyway, it's worth checking out VIM. If it doesn't click with you, look at Emacs. I'd imagine that it has as many plug-ins/scripts for Python as VIM. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
