[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac User Python Newbies

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 11, 2005, at 12:51, Roger Binns wrote:

>> I don't really understand how your are doing the development.  You 
>> have to jump to a term window to run the script?
>
> I use xemacs as my editor.  The main functionality used is the syntax
> colouring.  It also has a menu bar plugin (IM-Python) that lists the
> classes and methods in the current file and lets you jump to them.
>
> And a seperate terminal window to run things in.  I use this same
> setup on Windows, Linux and Mac.  For a debugger I just place this
> wherever I need to have a deeper look at what is going on:
>
>  import pdb ; pdb.set_trace()

Use this instead:

   import pdb; pdb.Pdb().set_trace()

It is more convenient in that you end up at the stack level you 
actually want to be at, rather than inside py2app.

> The single biggest factor for productivity I have found is how
> much screen space you have, preferably across two (or more) monitors.  
> The more you can see and the more context you can have
> at once, the quicker you work and the less errors you make.  It is 
> really nice to have one place where you are writing code, one
> where you are looking at what you are calling, one for documentation
> and one for where the output of your program is.  (I guess that is
> 4 monitors :-)

Yeah, I use two 1600x1024 LCDs most of the time.  I can also be pretty 
productive on my 15" laptop, where I just use 80 char wide terminal 
windows.  I have been playing around with Desktop Manager 
<http://wsmanager.sourceforge.net/> (GPL) on the laptop in order to 
keep coding on one desktop and email/etc. on another.  It seems to work 
pretty well, but I haven't used it enough to "get the hang of it" yet.

-bob