So, I’m sitting there trying to install a python module with pip and the package keeps erroring, saying the package has a problem on line X of file y in some-package-3.4.1.tar.gz.

Ugh! Must I really de-tar/zip this and crawl through it and edit the code and then retar/zip the code and so on?

No.

Not with vim.

You just go…

$ vim some-package-3.4.1.tar.gz

vim then unzips and untars the file and shows it as a directory listing. You arrow-down the list, pick the file you want, hit return and it opens the file ready to edit. Noice!

When finished, all you do is, as normal, just go :wq and it saves the file and shows the list of files in the tar archive again. :wq again and vim re-tars and re-compresses the file, ready to use. On a scale of 1-10, that is clearly an 11.