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I'm just learning Sphinx, and I need to edit ReST files. Is there an intelligent editor for it? Like, an editor that gives me code coloration, easy indentation, code completion (hopefully), etc.

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what kind of code completion would you be looking for? I'm in the process of writing a vim plugin for restructured text, so I'd def be interested in that. –  Jeff Tratner May 18 '12 at 0:38

8 Answers 8

vi is very good at this. I was just editing some .rst files right now and it colors the headings, monospaced text, etc. The macros let you very quickly turn text into headings and whatnot.

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Emacs with rst-mode: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/emacs.html

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Very rich RST support. Daily in use. Highly recommend! +1 –  gavenkoa Feb 12 '13 at 20:51
rst-mode needs table-mode, to edit tables. But it is very slow, so that one can see a lag when inserting characters. It knows only tables made with + and -, but not = which is available in spinx too. –  Jonas Stein Jun 15 at 11:28

Gedit has a ReST plugin which supports syntax highlighting, keyboard shortcuts ("snippets"), and HTML preview.

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There is also a rst mode for the Jed editor: http://jedmodes.sf.net/mode/rst/

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jEdit also has ReST highlighting, but no ReST specific auto-completion features (it does support macros though).

I would opt for vim or Cream, personally.

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I use vim and have some useful mappings in my .vimrc:

nnoremap <leader>1 yypVr=
nnoremap <leader>2 yypVr- 
nnoremap <leader>3 yypVr'
nnoremap <leader>4 yypVr`
vmap <silent> <leader>b :call BulletList()<cr>

" Bullet List
function! BulletList()
  let lineno = line(".")
  call setline(lineno, "* " . getline(lineno))

And often create vim macros on th fly depending on the file I have to restructure

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Isn't the BulletList() just a I* ? –  queueoverflow May 28 '12 at 17:37

Leo does some of this.

More info from Creating Documents with Leo :

  1. "View nodes can show you many different views of your writing simultaneously..."
  2. "... The rst3 command converts an @rst tree to rST and then sends this text to docutils or Sphinx for further processing."
  3. "... automatically creates rST sections from headlines"

There are additional features mentioned later in the documentation.

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