When not using the interactive prompt, what are you using? I keep hearing everyone say Emacs, but I can't understand it at all. I keep trying to learn and understand why so many seem to like it because I can't understand customization even without going through a hundred menus that might contain the thing I am looking for (or I could go learn another language just to customize!).
Personally I like SciTE, it has everything I think a midweight editor should: code folding, proper python support, nice colors out of the box, hotkey access to compile (I'm sure emacs does this, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how), etc. Opinions on what the best is? Or reading I could get to maybe sway me to Emacs (which has the major advantage of being on everyone's system). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list