[Pythonmac-SIG] IDE that doesn't look awful?
Joe Strout
joe at strout.net
Tue Oct 21 19:45:02 CEST 2008
On Oct 21, 2008, at 10:59 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:
> Otherwise I would have stayed with SPE (FYI: it includes the
> debugger Winpdb and the GUI builder wxGlade; I never used them).
I tried SPE last night, and it looks promising... but the developer
seems to be determined to discourage new users. Its "home page"
appears to be just a blog, that hardly mentions SPE at all. A well-
hidden "download" link takes you to here: <http://pythonide.stani.be/>
...where ten different files are listed under "SPE 0.8.4" (and even to
get that far you must choose to investigate or ignore something above
it called "sdxf"). Nothing explains what all these are or which to
download. I mulled this over for a while and finally downloaded the
first one, SPE-0.8.4.c-wx2.6.1.0-no_setup.zip, and unzipped it. There
as no README, so I took a guess on running the SPE.py file, and this
finally brought up something that looks like an IDE... but I can't get
even the simplest one-line "Hello World" script to actually run. The
Help menu takes you to a page offering to sell you a manual for a $5
or more "donation," but I'm not ready to donate yet, as I can't tell
that it's even going to work, and no email address for the author is
given anywhere that I can find. (I did finally find a web form where
I could submit a question, which I did yesterday, and haven't yet
received a reply.)
So, while it does look like a nice editor and isn't half as ugly as
Wing, it's certainly not very inviting when it comes to actual use.
I'm still hopeful though that these difficulties can be overcome. (I
forgot to mention it, since in my mind it's implied by "IDE", but a
debugger really is a must-have feature, and SPE at least claims to
have one.)
> Additionally I like TextWrangler for the lighter editing tasks, esp.
> because it starts really fast.
TextWrangler's start time doesn't matter to me, since I have it open
at all times anyway. :) But yes, you can't beat TW for performance.
I also love how it integrates with the command line, providing the
edit and twdiff commands for example (twdiff is especially nice in
conjunction with svn).
> The easy way of switching encodings is just great! (Most editors
> can't do that at all, don't understand why.)
Agreed.
> jEdit is Java-ugly; a lot of plugins don't work well on a Mac...
> SciTE is X11 only.
> Tried Komodo once but didn't like it.
> I don't run EmacsOS (I don't need another operating system).
> vi is good for remote jobs.
I appreciate the reviews. So far, SPE looks most promising to me, if
I can get over the initial hurdles. Peppy also looks decent, though I
think it's just an editor (no debugger). Same for Editra.
I should probably go back through and write a brief review of all the
ones I'm trying; there are other Python IDE reviews out there, but
none geared to the user wanting a Mac experience.
Best,
- Joe
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