[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: IDE recommendation

[Bob Ippolito]

On Mar 30, 2005, at 11:34 PM, Chris Barker wrote:

>
>> I had looked at XCode
>
> So what is the story with XCode? Has Apple made it extensible and 
> customizable enough that it could be made into a good general purpose 
> IDE/editor? One thing that has always bugged me about all the IDEs 
> I've even seen is that they are designed for a couple 
> languages/compilers,a nd are lousy for other things. That's why I use 
> Xemacs for everything on Linux: It has an excellent mode for every 
> kind of text file I've ever needed to edit. I still haven't found an 
> editor on the Mac I like much. I use BBedit, but it doesn't handle 
> indentation very well with Python, and there are a number of things I 
> don't like about the interface. I think what I like least is that Bare 
> Bones decides how it will work, and if you don't like that: too bad. 
> Is XCode better?
>
> I had high hopes for Pepper, but it has been in limbo for a long time 
> now. Maybe Eclipse will be my savior...we'll see.

Xcode isn't terribly extensible via public API, but it has a very 
modular design if you prod at it, so there's a possibility that they'll 
open the flood gates in the future.  It will let you plug in arbitrary 
code (but you have no documented APIs to do much with, beyond AppKit), 
and add stuff to the scripts menu.

How come you're not using XEmacs, Terminal+Emacs, or Carbon Emacs on 
Mac OS X?  Personally I use Vim in a terminal.  I plan to switch to 
Xcode for Python development when it's sufficiently documented and 
extensible, though.

-bob