[CentralOH] Python IDE

[William McVey]

On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 13:49 -0500, Bryan Harris wrote:
> Hi all,
> What editors do people on here prefer? I use a combination of vi and
> gedit, but sometimes I yearn for the intelligent auto-completion which
> I get in an IDE like eclipse with Java. (Eclipse pydev is so slow it's
> completely unusable.) Is WingIDE worth getting for this reason?


I personally love Wing. For close to 8 years, I did python development
with vi/vim. I switched to Wing a couple of years ago. I've had issues
in the past with converting from 20 years of vi muscle memory to some
other editor, but Wing has some one of the best vi-binding compatibility
modes I've seen among any non-vi/vim based editor. The are also *very*
serious about their vi-compatibility and treat divergences with vi
behavior as actual bugs.

Beyond their vi compatibility (which was needed to even get me to use
it), their feature list is pretty impressive. From
{keyword,variable,module,syntax}-completion, interactive debugger,
project navigator, revision-control integration, testcase harness (with
ability to drop to interactive debugger on testcase failure), support
for project-specific virtualenvs (especially important for interactive
debugger as well as completion engine), and many more features I haven't
even gotten around to exploring. Overall, it's a very fine product. If
you're new to python or only use python for occasional tasks, it may be
overkill (although you might be interested in Wing IDE 101, a stripped
down option available for free for non-commercial use). If you're
developing in python as part of your profession (or for your passionate
hobby), I would very much recommend trying their 30day free trial, and
giving it whirl. It took me about a week to really become "hooked" (and
it's improved substantially since then even).

  -- William