Komodo: First Impressions

Paul Magwene paul.magwene at yale.edu
Sat Apr 7 13:06:23 EDT 2001


I downloaded, installed, and played around with Komodo 1.0 for Windows this
morning.  The following are my first impressions of this beast:

1.  It's awfully large! the Komodo folder on my machine weighs in at around
63 MB (the installer told me I'd need ~140 MB - I don't know if that was
just overestimation or a bunch of other files got dumped in Windows root
partitions).

2.  The IDE is well layed out, attractive to the eyes, and easy to use.  It
appears to use Scintilla (or something that looks/works just like it), so
it's got nice folding features, etc.  Overall it provides a very appealing
"look and feel."

3.  Using the debugger is quite intuitive and it even plays nice with
Tkinter programs (but see speed issues below).

3.  The nice "look and feel" alluded to above seems to come at a price -
this thing is dog-slow!  I'm running Komodo on a Dual Pentium II 300 machine
with 384 MB of RAM (NT4/sp6a, yadda yadda....), and no other processes
running.  Startup alone seems to take at least 10 secs.  Once inside the
editor, input speed, folding, etc. seems OK.  However, there are still
noticable (and annoying) delays when opening files, calling the help system,
and debugging (which can feel glacial at times).
    My guess is that the speed is a reflection of the underling Mozilla
engine, but whatever it's cause I think it will be the biggest impediment to
wide-spread adoption of Komodo (at least until which time this issue is
resolved).


Komodo seems thoughtfully designed, and is very promising, but I can't
imagine using it on a regular basis until it gets an order of magnitude
faster.

--Paul Magwene




More information about the Python-list mailing list