>> I'm thinking about text editor. > GUIs aren't the most Pythonic thing you could find to write.
Text editor != GUI Many of the most interesting text editors are not GUI bsased and in fact there is a gap(IMHO) at the moment for a really good batch oriented text editor(*) - sed is OK but it is really stream based, not batch. So a really nice batch oriented text editor would be a potentially useful tool. Now a beginner won't write a killer batch editor first time out but it sure would be an interesting starter project and potentially easy to add features later. (*)By batch oriented I mean the ability to edit a text filke by loading a set of prewritten editing commands, these can then be applied to a whole set of files from a shell loop say. Of course you could write a Python program to do this or an elisp function for emacs etc. But a true batch oriented editor (as used to be found on mainframe and midi computers - Think EDT on VAX; except it had inrteractive mode too) You invoke it like: $ myeditor -dfilename=foobar.py myfile.txt mycommands.cmd and mycommands .cmd looks something like: g25 # go line 25 s/mystring/otherstring/ # replace string df/startRE/finishRE/ # delete from start to finish g+7 # move down 7 lines 3w # move in 3 words i$filename # insert the value of filename (defined in the commandline x # save and exit That's in vi like pseudo code but hopefully gives an idea. Its easy enough to make up your own, maybe an SGML style. EDT used words like: LINE 25 SUBSTR mystring newstrinhg DELETE FROM mystring TO endstring etc... You can of course include loops and subroutines/macros too. The value of this as a beginner project is that no display magic needs to happen, simple status messages are enough... > For example, in Tkinter, you can bind buttons to function calls, but > you can't have buttons pass arguments to the functions. So you have > to somehow make a separate function for each button, or do some > weird backend event handling stuff that you can look up Its almost trivially simple to do that. I wouldn't think it would deter too many beginners. (ie a lambda calling a function providing the arguments needed) > interested. Point is, you don't want to be hindered by having to > figure out stuff like that when you're just learning how to use a > new language. But the basic point is well made, you don't want to be learning new frameworks when you are really trying to learn core python. > Or were you suggesting a console-based text editor? Console based is possible, either in line mode like ex, ed or in screen mode like vi, or in batch mode as discussed above. You could even use page mode like ISPF on MVS, so far as I know there are no page mode editors on Wondows/Unix, it might be an interesting challenge! (OTOH hand there is a good reason there are no page mode editors oin those OS! :-) Alan G _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
