[Pythonmac-SIG] IDE that doesn't look awful?

[Joe Strout]

On Oct 21, 2008, at 10:59 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

> Otherwise I would have stayed with SPE (FYI: it includes the  
> debugger Winpdb and the GUI builder wxGlade; I never used them).

I tried SPE last night, and it looks promising... but the developer  
seems to be determined to discourage new users.  Its "home page"  
appears to be just a blog, that hardly mentions SPE at all.  A well- 
hidden "download" link takes you to here:  <http://pythonide.stani.be/>

...where ten different files are listed under "SPE 0.8.4" (and even to  
get that far you must choose to investigate or ignore something above  
it called "sdxf").  Nothing explains what all these are or which to  
download.  I mulled this over for a while and finally downloaded the  
first one, SPE-0.8.4.c-wx2.6.1.0-no_setup.zip, and unzipped it.  There  
as no README, so I took a guess on running the SPE.py file, and this  
finally brought up something that looks like an IDE... but I can't get  
even the simplest one-line "Hello World" script to actually run.  The  
Help menu takes you to a page offering to sell you a manual for a $5  
or more "donation," but I'm not ready to donate yet, as I can't tell  
that it's even going to work, and no email address for the author is  
given anywhere that I can find.  (I did finally find a web form where  
I could submit a question, which I did yesterday, and haven't yet  
received a reply.)

So, while it does look like a nice editor and isn't half as ugly as  
Wing, it's certainly not very inviting when it comes to actual use.   
I'm still hopeful though that these difficulties can be overcome.  (I  
forgot to mention it, since in my mind it's implied by "IDE", but a  
debugger really is a must-have feature, and SPE at least claims to  
have one.)

> Additionally I like TextWrangler for the lighter editing tasks, esp.  
> because it starts really fast.

TextWrangler's start time doesn't matter to me, since I have it open  
at all times anyway.  :)  But yes, you can't beat TW for performance.   
I also love how it integrates with the command line, providing the  
edit and twdiff commands for example (twdiff is especially nice in  
conjunction with svn).

> The easy way of switching encodings is just great! (Most editors  
> can't do that at all, don't understand why.)

Agreed.

> jEdit is Java-ugly; a lot of plugins don't work well on a Mac...
> SciTE is X11 only.
> Tried Komodo once but didn't like it.
> I don't run EmacsOS (I don't need another operating system).
> vi is good for remote jobs.

I appreciate the reviews.  So far, SPE looks most promising to me, if  
I can get over the initial hurdles.  Peppy also looks decent, though I  
think it's just an editor (no debugger).  Same for Editra.

I should probably go back through and write a brief review of all the  
ones I'm trying; there are other Python IDE reviews out there, but  
none geared to the user wanting a Mac experience.

Best,
- Joe