[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac User Python Newbies

[Roger Binns]

> I don't really understand how your are doing the development.  You have 
> to jump to a term window to run the script?

I use xemacs as my editor.  The main functionality used is the syntax
colouring.  It also has a menu bar plugin (IM-Python) that lists the
classes and methods in the current file and lets you jump to them.

And a seperate terminal window to run things in.  I use this same
setup on Windows, Linux and Mac.  For a debugger I just place this
wherever I need to have a deeper look at what is going on:

  import pdb ; pdb.set_trace()


My wxPython code is hand coded.  I haven't found any of the design
tools to be much good for non-trivial projects.  For example try
doing something like the wxPython demo with one of them.  They
also don't work well if you have custom widgets, which is a lot 
of my UI.

The single biggest factor for productivity I have found is how
much screen space you have, preferably across two (or more) 
monitors.  The more you can see and the more context you can have
at once, the quicker you work and the less errors you make.  It 
is really nice to have one place where you are writing code, one
where you are looking at what you are calling, one for documentation
and one for where the output of your program is.  (I guess that is
4 monitors :-)

Roger