Coming from delphi - looking for an IDE - willing to spend money

[Dave Hughes]

Just call me James wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Coming away from the luxury of the delphi IDE has been something of a
> shock.
> 
> As a consequence I've become aware that maybe I need to spend some
> money on a python IDE.
> 
> As a beginner I reckon integrated debugging would be helpful.
> 
> Does anyone have any advice or suggestions? So far I've glanced at
> Komodo, but as a beginner I'm not in a positon to evaluate it.
> 
> thanks for exprienced advice,
> 
> Greg

I sympathize entirely (I've been a Delphi user since v2 and have yet to
find an equally competent IDE for just about any language). Here's the
list of IDEs I went through in my transition from Delphi to Python (I
started off hacking around with Python on my Linux box with vim, but
quickly went searching for something a bit more comprehensive and
specific to the language):


Boa Constructor
http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/

Heavy-weight IDE designed to be a sort of Delphi-for-Python. Includes
integrated debugging, visual form designer and property inspector (uses
wxWindows as its GUI framework) and a pretty cool editor (based on the
Scintilla component).

It's still a bit flaky in some places, but it's certainly usable. That
said, my machine isn't exactly fast: I eventually got fed up with the
slow speed and went hunting for something a bit quicker...


Stani's Python Editor (SPE)
http://pythonide.stani.be/

Heavy-weight editor (based on Scintilla IIRC) with Blender integration.
Uses wxGlade or XRCed as visual form designers. Didn't try this one for
long; for some reason the interface just didn't "feel" right. Then
again, it's open-source and many swear by it so you may as well give it
a shot.


TruStudio
http://www.xored.com/trustudio

Heavy-weight IDE (based on Eclipse). Gave it a whirl but as you can
imagine, if my machine was slow with Boa Constructor, the Java-based
Eclipse was just glacial... Urgh.


PyScripter
http://mmm-experts.com/Products.aspx?ProductId=4

Light-weight IDE with integrated debugging (no visual form designer). I
was interested in this as it's written in Delphi. Hence, it's pretty
damned fast, small, and serves as an interesting example of integrating
the Python interpreter in Delphi applications (something I was
interested in doing, though I haven't had an actual need to do so yet).

Unfortunately, the editor component used is SynEdit (which, being a
Delphi user I'm guessing you've probably heard of and/or used).
SynEdit's a great component for small scale editing, but it's just got
too many bugs when dealing with large files or long editing sessions,
and lacks some of Scintilla's neat features like code-folding (given
that the source for PyScripter is available it might be interesting to
try replacing the SynEdit editor with Scintilla since there's a Delphi
interface for Scintilla available ... although I suspect it'd be a
pretty big job).


Notepad2
http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

Light-weight editor (based on Scintilla). Little more than a notepad
replacement (no integrated debugger or visual stuff) with those
features you always wanted in notepad (support for UNIX line breaks,
syntax highlighting, etc).


At this point I realized I'd gone from heavy-weight full-blown IDEs
with integrated debugging, to heavy-weight editors, to light-weight
editors, and back to using stack traces and the odd print statement for
debugging. However, I also found (to my surprise) that I'd got
comfortable enough with Python that not having integrated debugging no
longer bothered me. I realized what I was really searching for was a
small, fast, powerful editor...

And so it was that after 2 or 3 weeks of hunting for the best IDE for
me, I wound up right back where I started: vim :-)

Still, I consider the journey to have been worth it (e.g. the
integrated debugger in Boa helped me learn Python that much quicker by
making it easy to spot my beginners mistakes).

You might want to check out eric3 as well. I haven't tried it but it's
another one some people swear by:
http://www.die-offenbachs.de/detlev/eric3.html


Good luck!

Dave.
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