IDE Question

[Fabio Zadrozny]

> Isn't Eclipse kind of project oriented? I.e. not suited for opening a
> single file, anywhere, and viewing/editing it.  I get the impression
> that it prefers to have some "project" or "workspace" file which
> groups a set of files and contains configuration, build rules and so
> on.  The guy three postings up suggested a general-purpose text editor.

Yes, it prefers to have a project or workspace (which really helps you
navigating through the source, so, it's one thing I usually see as
positive, not negative). Still, you can use it to edit files outside
of its workspace -- that's supported on Pydev -- but it looses some of
those features (which are not usually available on regular editors
anyway, so, that'd probably be ok if comparing with an editor, not an
IDE)

> (As a side note: I don't use Eclipse myself, but I have seen novice
> programmers editing Python code with it, and what saw wasn't
> impressive. They *did* some kind of Python "plugin" installed, but
> were sitting there pressing SPACE to indent every line manually.)

Not sure which plugin they had, but I'm pretty positive that if they
had Pydev installed they'd have auto-indent without any problems (I
can assure you that auto-indent is a feature that received a lot of
attention in Pydev).

Cheers,

Fabio