Best Python Editor

[andyrsmith at googlemail.com]

If we could go back to emacs again for a second...

I'm still using emacs but have been playing with a few other ide's
(wing, komodo + pydev) are the ones i've given a go recently.

However I still end up coming back to emacs for what I consider to be
emacs mode's piece of 'killer functionality', (well, killer for me
anyway :-) ) which is the C-c C-c shortcut to send the contents of the
current buffer to a running interpreter. (i.e. one long-running
interpreter that behaves as if the entire buffer had been retyped).

Not very useful on first glance, but compared with what I've found to
be the 'standard' run-this-script-in-a-new-interpreter function the
other ides seem to have it has the following advantages.

1/ No wait for another interpreter to start up

2/ It lets you do the following in a script which lends itself to a
much tighter edit-run loop ...

try:
   runOnce
except:
   doSomePainfulDataGathering()
   runOnce = 1

doSomeLessPainfulDataProcessing()

i.e. the painful part will only get executed once, so its cost can be
amortized over multiple runs of the script. Of course care has to be
taken to ensure the script doesn't violate causality (i.e. code can
creep in that depends on variables that haven't yet been initialized) ,
but in practice I haven't found it to be much of a problem. (And can be
checked quickly by simply killing the running interpreter and starting
a fresh one).

Anyway, the question is whether or not any of the other IDE's support
this style of working, (I say I'd *played* with some of them but can't
swear I'd dug through every nook and cranny of all of their menu
options)

Cheers,

A.