I am not sure this pertains to your interests, but I just saw an article about a distro for the RPI4 that boots directly into BBC Basic. The creator started from a minimal Linux install (Yes, text/curses mode only-no gui) and added the basic interpreter and made it the default user shell.

Indeed.
Even simple Nano does highlighting when opening a .py-file. Might be all I need.

There was a similar system, for the 50th anniversary of BASC, but all pointers were dead.

I found the article: https://popey.com/blog/2021/01/raspb...boot-to-basic/
(if you are talking about another one, let me know)
And, O man, I can relate to this guy for a 100%. Maybe that's an option the Raspberry Pi Foundation should really consider to endorse.
It's not really what I was aiming for - I still want interaction with the OS, other languages and applications - but I actually might try to duplicate his work on one of my own RPi's. Or maybe on an old laptop.

Then glad I mentioned it. When I code python, I code in VIM. That is also how I code V (vlang). I miss the kind of IDE that Turbo Pascal from Borland had, but I find nothing that quite satisfies the same urge for me in CURSES/text mode for ANY language.

BTW: the tricks the guy used to BASIC his RPI could easily be used for ANY machine that supports a minimal Linux install. It occurs to me that any old (or ancient) laptop that no longer serves well using a GUI interface would make into a fun toy!

VAX WPS. I never used it but it was available under the Educational Site License Program we took advantage of back in the late-'80s/early-'90s. The people who did our documentation back in those days were using VAX DOCUMENT (DEC's flavor of SGML with a TeX backend) and I recall setting them up to use EVE for text entry and writing some sort of DCL script to launch WPS as a document viewer before committing pixels to our LN03 printer.

No. DEC had a full-featured email/word processor/calender application whose name escapes me at the moment but the common nickname for it was ``System Load Exerciser''. (This was around the time Lotus Symphony was around for the PC users.) The University dedicated a VAX 6440 just to run that beast of an application. I only ever encountered it once in a non-Univ setting---and it was a real time sink because everybody did the "copy all" option when sending out just about anything. (Poor training, IMHO.)

I lean toward Emacs for Python programming though I have used Geany. It offers the nifty vertical lines to highlight the indenting better than Emacs. Of course, once I clean up the indentation problems I've created for myself, I save and reload the file in Emacs. [smile]