Do you recommend using a text editor(like vim, emacs, sublime text, atom) for doing an intensive and large AI project like experimenting with Deep RL, GAN’s on large data …?
If yes which editor would you recommend ??
Thanks.
Most people use Jupyter Notebook for Iterative Programming and keep Code, Results visualizations and Documentations together. Once the experimentation is done, you may want to abstract things into functions and put into .py file. Jupyter Notebooks are still relevant even when doing large projects to experiment. This is what you will see in Fast.AI, where all the library code is in .py file, but the lessons are in jupyter notebook.
There’s no right answer to what’s the best Text Editor for Python files - Jupyter, Vim, SublimeText, Atom, PyCharm,and many more. This is more like asking what’s your favorite food and let me see if that’s also something I like. The only way to evaluate is to try a few of them and see what’s your Taste 
The answer is easy for me when I’m running things locally … VSCode.
Things get a bit trickier when I’m working on a remote server. There I use VIM or VSCode (using the very easy to setup Remote VSCode plugin).
I’m new to VIM but getting the hang of it the more I use it. I still can’t get autocomplete/intellisense working (which is so damn frustratiting since you get used to it via IDEs like VSCode), but its easy enough to navigate around files using things like ctags. Because its so ubiquitous and used, I suggest at least getting comfortable with it since you’re going to see it used frequently.
On the otherhand, I’ve found using VSCode with the aforementioned plugin to be my preferred way of coding for now. My typical workflow is to start with Jupyter notebooks and once I have stuff worked out there, codify it in .py files using VSCode. Sometimes I’ll use VIM if its a quick-and-dirty fix or if I want to be able to find out where things are defined in other files.
If I can ever get autocomplete working in VIM … I may lean more towards it as my default editor.
3 Likes
Thanks @wgpubs , any update on how to get autocomplete working in VIM ? The time to type a long function (and sometime mistyping) can compensate its advantage. 
I really want to know how VIM expert working with it. They also use autocompletion or remember it all ?
1 Like
Then you don’t want to hear from me 
I wish I had a good answer/solution but I don’t. If you come across one of these experts and they can show you how to do autocompletion against a target conda environment, I’d love to know too.
1 Like