Which editor to use¶

Software developers spend most of their working time with a source code editor.

Text editors like joe or nano are good for occasional changes in files on a server that you access via a terminal, but they are not designed for jumping back and forth in a repository with thousands of source code files.

If you haven’t yet made up your choice about which editor to use, then we recommend to start with Pulsar. See the next section. There are other choices, see Python editors and and IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments.

Getting started with Pulsar¶

Follow the installation instructions on https://pulsar-edit.dev

Once in Pulsar, you should install two packges: atom-ide-base and pulsar-ide-python.

Select File ‣ Add project folder… and add your ~/lino directory. This will cause Pulsar to index all files below this directory.

Some useful keyboard shortcuts:

Ctrl+P open an existing file using fuzzy file name search within all files of the project.
Shfit+Ctrl+F find (and optionally replace) a text string in all files (or in some)
Alt+Q reflow selection
Ctrl+Alt+O go to definition

In the pulsar-ide-python settings,

change line length from 79 to 88

Set the Ignore field to the following value:

E121, E123, E126, E226, E24, E704, F403, W503, W504

Discussion about some of these warnings:

F403 (from module import * used; unable to detect undefined names). See #5966 (Should we stop using from .ui import *?)
E501 (line too long) caused #5965 (SyntaxError: unterminated string literal)