[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: IDE recommendation

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <3f085ecd050406085942fcac11 at mail.gmail.com>,
 Kevin Dangoor <dangoor at gmail.com> wrote:

>...
>  I've become fond of TextMate lately. It's a fairly new editor and is
> missing some features, but what it does it does well. It has good
> project organization and makes it easy to switch between files in your
> project. The really spiffy thing, though, is that it is very easily
> extended via Unix filters. So, you can make filters that do anything
> to your text in any language (eg Python) and have the result pop back
> into your buffer. There are a fair number of add-ons available already
> (because of how easy it is to extend), but they're only accessible via
> a Subversion repository at the moment.
> 
> TextMate is $39, which is infinitely more than free, but considerably
> less than BBEdit.

I agree it has great potential. However, I also feel it has too many 
rough edges and am waiting for it to mature.

Problems include:
- Wretched syntax coloring for Python (orange and other colors on black 
strike you?). Yes you can change it, but it's not easy.
- Multiple undo undoes one keystroke at a time.
- Code folding is nice, but does not work well with Python (and this 
cannot be fixed unless the editor's folding support is improved)
- No toolbar (nor any contextual menu substitute). I normally hate 
toolbars, but a pop-up menu of functions and objects along the top of a 
source file is really handy. Easy access to file-specific settings such 
as line ending and tab spacing is also something I use a lot.

TextMate has a lot of potential. Once they polish it up a bit I plan to 
switch. $39 is an excellent price (even considering that TextWranger 
does more for free).

(By the way, Pepper allows you to write filters in the language of your 
choice. I think TextWrangler does, as well.)

I just gave WingIDE a try yesterday, at Bob Ippolito's suggestion, and I 
am really impressed. The fact that is X11 is a problem, but the debugger 
is great (boy have I missed not having a good debugger) and the code 
browser isn't bad either. And it allows one to test GUI apps without 
fuss (unlike IDLE, which at least at one time required removing the 
"root.mainloop()" statement from Tkinter apps before running them.

Has anyone tried EricIDE and WingIDE? Any idea of the relative merits 
and weaknesses?

-- Russell