python for beginners - Command Line versus Text Editor

1. Command Line versus Text Editor
a. This section is going to get more into what I mentioned earlier: do you use the command line like IDLE and type commands live or do you type up your commands into a text editor and then run a file? The main reason you use the command line is to execute a few commands at a time. It is also a great tool for beginners when you don’t have to write too many lines in a row. The problem here is that the larger the program, the more lines you have to write. You do not want to re-write all of them again every time you want to run the line or change anything. With a text editor, you can write all of the lines and save them in a file. This is very useful for editing a lot of lines of code. The command line is not scalable. This means that the more lines you had to more exponentially hard it gets to maintain the code. Text editors, such as Sublime or Notepad++, also have a cool feature that highlights keywords and other important things. This makes it very easy to read and edit code. There are also other useful things such as indenting and formatting. In order to use a text editor, you will need to download and use a terminal (basic terminal in Linux or something like Cygwin for Windows and Mac). To run a program, you must save the file as .py and then in the terminal write “python filename.py”. This will run the file, but you need to make sure that you are in the same directory as the file.