[Tutor] IDLE problems, recommend a good IDE ?

[Andrew Fant]

--On Wednesday, May 26, 2004 07:48:32 -0800 Tim Johnson 
<tim at johnsons-web.com> wrote:

> * Dave S <pythontut at pusspaws.net> [040525 01:56]:
>> Ive been learning on IDLE, which has been great but I have had
>> occasional stability problems, which are a bit
>> disconcerting. It just locked up X on my gentoo system :-(  Anyhow Im
>> back now -
>

Dave:
    Good to see more gentoo-types coming out of the woodwork.  I'd check my 
optimizations settings in make.conf and steer away from excessive compiler 
flags, just as generic advice.  If you are depending on -f flags instead of 
the -O and -march/-mcpu options, wierd things can happen.

As far as IDEs go, I never got into idle myself.  boa-constructor is in 
portage, but it is a rather heavyweight tool for developing larger apps 
(particularly gui tools with WxPython).  I've played with it a little, but 
it is almost certainly overkill for those of us, including myself, who are 
still learning.  I'm doing all my coding lately in Komodo.  It's not free, 
but Activestate sells the educational/hobbiest version for about 30 
dollars.  The key bindings are a little annoying, and I am working on 
setting them to be more emacsish, but aside from that, it works very 
nicely.  It also has a nice graphical source debugger built in which has 
saved my rear several times lately.  If you use komodo as a professional 
developer, you are supposed to by their pro version which is more 
expensive, but also includes a graphical gui builder and support for tcl/tk 
(the educational version supports perl, python, and php fully, with syntax 
highlighting for many other languages).  Installation went fine on my 
gentoo systems, and it hasn't had caused me any problems yet.

Andy