Eclipse best/good or bad IDE for Python?

[seberino]

I'm trying to move beyond Emacs/Vim/Kate
and was wondering if Eclipse is better and if it is the *best*
IDE for Python.

Should I leave Emacs and do Python coding in Eclipse?

Chris

[Jorge Godoy]

"se******@spawar.navy.mil" <se******@spawar.navy.mil> writes:

I'm trying to move beyond Emacs/Vim/Kate
and was wondering if Eclipse is better and if it is the *best*
IDE for Python.

Should I leave Emacs and do Python coding in Eclipse?

IMVVVHO, Eclipse is like a "graphical" Emacs. It uses a lot more memory,
demands an structure that makes you put your projects under its structure
instead of using any layout that you wish. Integrating it with Subversion,
CVS or other VCS is as hard as with Emacs -- if not harder for some VCS...

But, it is just me and I use Emacs for something like 7 years now... ;-)

--
Jorge Godoy <go***@ieee.org>

[elbertlev]

Eclipse is very-very slow. 3G P4 looks like 8M 86. It might be good for
Java, but not for Python. BUT THIS IS 1 OF 2 IDE'S WHICH ALLOWS
DEBUGGING OF MULTITHREADED APPLICATIONS. I prefer Eric or PythonWin.

[elbertlev]

Eclipse is very-very slow. 3G P4 looks like 8M 86. It might be good for
Java, but not for Python. BUT THIS IS 1 OF 2 IDE'S WHICH ALLOWS
DEBUGGING OF MULTITHREADED APPLICATIONS. I prefer Eric or PythonWin.

[James]

There is no answer for that question. All Python IDEs have their own
strengths and weaknesses and different programmers expect different
things from their IDEs. What's best for YOU depends on what features
you need. PyDev, without question a "good" IDE. BEST is a subjective
affair.

I use Eclipse (or SPE) when I am unfamiliar with an API and auto list
members helps in those cases. Otherwise SciTe (or Vim/Kate/Emacs in
your case) suits me well.

[Jean-François Doyon]

I'm a big fan of Eclipse and reocmmend it to anyone who asks :)

No one can say any one is the *best*, since it's a matter of taste,
but it's pretty darn good.

The main benefit IMO is it's felibility ... Eclipse is a *framework*,
that can handle lots things quite well, like HTML (If you're coding
python for the web), C/C++ (If you're building extensions), XML if
you're using that, and so on ... All from within one application, all
with common paradigms.

The handling of RCS' is also common ...

I use Eclipse + PyDev + Subclipse everyday!

Of course I never could get into Emacs ... It's incredibly powerful too
though ... Why move away from it? Is it missing something you need?

+1 on eclipse from me!

J.F.

se******@spawar.navy.mil wrote:

I'm trying to move beyond Emacs/Vim/Kate
and was wondering if Eclipse is better and if it is the *best*
IDE for Python.

Should I leave Emacs and do Python coding in Eclipse?

Chris

[Fabio Zadrozny]

Hi Chris,

I think that you should try it yourself... being the *best ide* is
usually a subjective matter, so, you should decide yourself if it is the
best IDE for the task you want it to.

I must also warn you that I'm its current maintainer, and it is *my*
favorite IDE :-)

Also, I use it for large projects (2569 .py files on my python
installation and about 1800 .py files in my project), and, altough I
agree with the general idea that you need a fast computer to use it at
optimal performance, I found that using an athlon 1600+ with 512mb RAM
was enough for me when using eclipse with pydev (also, the features
provided by eclipse are more than worth the loss of speed when editing
some things when compared to editors such as vi or emacs, altough the
learning curve for that might not be so light, in the long run, I'm
pretty sure that it is worth it -- altough I really miss a faster
machine for compiling c++).

But in the end, as I said, it is a subjective matter, so, you'll have to
decide it for yourself.

Cheers,

Fabio

se******@spawar.navy.mil wrote:

I'm trying to move beyond Emacs/Vim/Kate
and was wondering if Eclipse is better and if it is the *best*
IDE for Python.

Should I leave Emacs and do Python coding in Eclipse?

Chris

[Aaron Bingham]

se******@spawar.navy.mil wrote:

I'm trying to move beyond Emacs/Vim/Kate
and was wondering if Eclipse is better and if it is the *best*
IDE for Python.

Should I leave Emacs and do Python coding in Eclipse?

I've been a heavy Emacs user for several years, but recently switched to
Eclipse for Python development. I was skeptical at first, but I gave it
a chance for a few days and was convinced.

The killer PyDev feature for me is pylint integration. Being informed
immediately when you mistype a variable name is a big timesaver. Also
nice is the refactoring support (although this it is possible to
integrate BicycleRepairMan! with Emacs, I found it easier to use in
Eclipse). I still find the Eclipse editor awkward for some things that
are easy in Emacs (Emacs is in my fingers), so I occasionally switch
back to Emacs for a quick edit.

Eclipse performance is not a problem for me, but I have a beefy box.

Enjoy,

Aaron Bingham

[gene tani]

se******@spawar.navy.mil wrote:

I'm trying to move beyond Emacs/Vim/Kate
and was wondering if Eclipse is better and if it is the *best*
IDE for Python.

Should I leave Emacs and do Python coding in Eclipse?

Chris

I'm agnostic; lots of IDE's/editors have buzz, you should learn to use
at least a couple well:

- vim, emacs
- Wing, Komodo, Textmate (OS X only)
- jedit, eclipse,
- eric, PythonWin, kate, leo, etc.

Check the wiki:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/DevelopmentTools

then google c.l.py for how your most desired features are supported:
syntax coloring, SVN integrate, auto-complete (if you think it helps),
pylint, threaded debugger, smart tags, object/class/code
folding/browser etc. This guy spent a lot of time composing this:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....ea5915f8f09546

[BartlebyScrivener]

>>if it is the *best* IDE for Python. <<

Nobody can answer this for you. Just try them all. The two I like that
I don't see mentioned in this thread are PythonCard (which is free) and
WingWare (which costs $30.00 but you can try for free.)

bs

[malv]

This is probably a fair answer.
My experience: Two years ago I started with Boa till I discovered eric.
I have been with eric ever since. Eric uses Qt as GUI. I think both Qt
and wx enable you to do pretty much the same thing. I like the work
F.Lundh did on Tkinter, but every time I try, I get bogged down in the
tcl mess that it builds on. Take the example of the indispensible
datagrid: a piece of cake in both Qt and wxWidgets, a nightmare
otherwise.

Since a couple of weeks I made the tour of wing-ide, komodo and PyDev.
PyDev appears really to be a top heavy kludge. Perhaps OK for java
lovers but very laborious to set up and work with, this in spite of the
abundant hype & spam on this board. Wing-ide's debugger stops on
imagined errors where eric and komodo do allright. I could not get the
designer to run on komodo. So I'm back at eric. On eric you use the
superb Qt designer. If you run linux, you get Qt and PyQt with KDE. You
can keep on running gnome if you want. For windows, Qt4 is supposed to
be free. Further, very extensive and attractive extensions exist: qwt
and qwt3d for graphics.

This is my experience. If I find better, I'll change.
malv

[Avizoa]

Though I tried most the above listed IDEs, sticking with a few for
awhile, I always find myself gravitating back to the one no one ever
mentions: IDLE. It's simple, fast, and with multiple monitors the lack
of tabs really isn't much of a problem.

The biggest reason I've found myself using IDLE is the
colorizing...I've found little support in other editors for builtins
having their own color. Granted, I haven't gotten far enough to bother
with that in some editors. Eclipse, for example, performs like a dog on
my dual opteron workstation w/ 2GB of RAM, which is more than enough to
annoy me. I shouldn't have to wait more than about 1 second for an
editor to start and then open what is essentially a text file :-P.

[Paul Boddie]

[e-mail] wrote:

Eclipse, for example, performs like a dog on
my dual opteron workstation w/ 2GB of RAM, which is more than enough to
annoy me. I shouldn't have to wait more than about 1 second for an
editor to start and then open what is essentially a text file :-P.

And then, due to the excessive "project management" screen furniture,
have to edit it "through the keyhole"...

Paul

[John J. Lee]

Aaron Bingham <bi*****@cenix-bioscience.com> writes:

se******@spawar.navy.mil wrote: [...ex-emacs user explains switch to Eclipse...] The killer PyDev feature for me is pylint integration. Being informed
immediately when you mistype a variable name is a big timesaver. Also
I now find it difficult to mis-type variable names in Emacs, since I
have F4 bound to dabbrev-expand. I also do standard things like using
query-replace when renaming. Actually, something like dabbrev-expand
is perhaps the one thing I would find indispensible switching to any
other editor -- I wonder if Eclipse/PyDev has it?

(dabbrev-expand searches backwards in the current buffer to find
'words' that are completions of the word you're typing immediately
before the cursor position (then back and forth in all other buffers
if search in the current buffer failed...), until it finds a
completion; then you can repeat the command to cycle through all other
possible completions.)

nice is the refactoring support (although this it is possible to
integrate BicycleRepairMan! with Emacs, I found it easier to use in
Eclipse).

[...]

Refactoring and the general 'semantic slant' certainly seems the
interesting bit about Eclipse (that and the fact that Emacs is a bit
old and hairy, and Eclipse is growing a big user base like Emacs).

Not entirely sure Lisp->Java is progress, though.
John

[gene tani]

Av****@gmail.com wrote:

Though I tried most the above listed IDEs, sticking with a few for
awhile, I always find myself gravitating back to the one no one ever
mentions: IDLE. It's simple, fast, and with multiple monitors the lack
of tabs really isn't much of a problem.

The biggest reason I've found myself using IDLE is the
colorizing...I've found little support in other editors for builtins
having their own color.

Do you mean keywords or modulenames/ classname that are builtin and
from stdlib?

colorization easily customized in Textmate, you can change color/
bold/italic /underlining of 32 categories of things (some not relevant
to python, and italics not really that useful)): Comments, keywords,
numers, user- defined constants, builtin consts, vars, strings, string
interpolation, preproc'r line, preproc'r directive, func/meth name,
class name, meth param, meth args, etc.

In komodo, you can choose text color/font size/bold/italics (but not
underline)for python for:bracebad, bracehighlite, classes, comments,
control chars, default, functions, identifiers, indent guides,
keywords,line numbers(?), numbers, operators, stderr/in/out, stringeol,
strings.

probably you can do similar things in vim,emacs,eclipse, wing, I
haven't checked. Being able to bold/underline (Not relying solely on
color) means you use fewer colors. Much easier on the eyes.

[John J. Lee]

Fabio Zadrozny <fa****@esss.com.br> writes:
[...]

I must also warn you that I'm its current maintainer, and it is *my*
favorite IDE :-) [...] But in the end, as I said, it is a subjective matter, so, you'll have to
decide it for yourself.

Hey, Fabio, can this be true:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=15820

|------- Comment #4 From Chris McLaren 2003-01-08 10:43 [reply] -------
|
|this is not a key bindings issue anymore - key bindings can be fully
|customized but vi emulation requires special support from the editor. closing
|this pr - best step is to try and lobby vi emulation to the draft proposal.

They're kidding, right??? Can it be possible there's no free vi mode
for Eclipse?? If something so basic is missing from the core stuff,
gives me little hope emacs will be displaced as the Big Beast of
editors anytime soon...

The basis in Java makes me worry a tiny bit too. First, Lisp plus the
'programmers scratch their own itch' model seems to have been very
successful in letting people Get the Job Done in Emacs. More
important, I fear licensing issues will keep away Emacs hackers who
might otherwise switch and make the platform more usable for other
Emacs refugees.

John

[Fabio Zadrozny]

John J. Lee wrote:

Aaron Bingham <bi*****@cenix-bioscience.com> writes:

se******@spawar.navy.mil wrote:

[...ex-emacs user explains switch to Eclipse...]

The killer PyDev feature for me is pylint integration. Being informed
immediately when you mistype a variable name is a big timesaver. Also

I now find it difficult to mis-type variable names in Emacs, since I
have F4 bound to dabbrev-expand. I also do standard things like using
query-replace when renaming. Actually, something like dabbrev-expand
is perhaps the one thing I would find indispensible switching to any
other editor -- I wonder if Eclipse/PyDev has it?

(dabbrev-expand searches backwards in the current buffer to find
'words' that are completions of the word you're typing immediately
before the cursor position (then back and forth in all other buffers
if search in the current buffer failed...), until it finds a
completion; then you can repeat the command to cycle through all other
possible completions.)

Yes, Eclipse has it by default (not a pydev work): Alt+/

nice is the refactoring support (although this it is possible to
integrate BicycleRepairMan! with Emacs, I found it easier to use in
Eclipse).

[...]

Refactoring and the general 'semantic slant' certainly seems the
interesting bit about Eclipse (that and the fact that Emacs is a bit
old and hairy, and Eclipse is growing a big user base like Emacs).

Not entirely sure Lisp->Java is progress, though.

Well, actually, pydev does some things with python too (code-completion
for builtins and bicycle repair man integration), and it would be
extremely simple to add some scripting capabilities with jython too, so,
I don't really think you'd be tied to 'only java' -- altough its core
will always be.

John

Cheers,

Fabio

[malv]

As "bicycle repair man integration" keeps popping up as a distinct
feature of jave-based PyDev, let it be known that other IDE's also have
this.
For example, non-java Eric has had " bicycle repair man" integration
for a very long time.

Personally, in spite of intense programming in python, I've never
encountered a real need for the bicycle gimmick.

[Fabio Zadrozny]

John J. Lee wrote:

Fabio Zadrozny <fa****@esss.com.br> writes:
[...]

I must also warn you that I'm its current maintainer, and it is *my*
favorite IDE :-)

[...]

But in the end, as I said, it is a subjective matter, so, you'll have to
decide it for yourself.

Hey, Fabio, can this be true:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=15820

|------- Comment #4 From Chris McLaren 2003-01-08 10:43 [reply] -------
|
|this is not a key bindings issue anymore - key bindings can be fully
|customized but vi emulation requires special support from the editor. closing
|this pr - best step is to try and lobby vi emulation to the draft proposal.

They're kidding, right??? Can it be possible there's no free vi mode
for Eclipse?? If something so basic is missing from the core stuff,
gives me little hope emacs will be displaced as the Big Beast of
editors anytime soon...

Well, I remember seeing one that was free (altough this was more than a
year ago -- I don't really use vi, so, I searched it just out of
curiosity), but if you searched and it was not found... I don't know,
maybe its author decided to make it commercial? Still, I'm pretty sure
there was one...
The basis in Java makes me worry a tiny bit too. First, Lisp plus the
'programmers scratch their own itch' model seems to have been very
successful in letting people Get the Job Done in Emacs. More
important, I fear licensing issues will keep away Emacs hackers who
might otherwise switch and make the platform more usable for other
Emacs refugees.
Being java, does not worry me that much... there are already many vms
aside from suns (including gcj), and I think that if you do not want to
program in java, adding scripting layers for jython, jruby, etc should
be fairly easy (given that someone has the time to do it).

John

Fabio

[Fabio Zadrozny]

malv wrote:

As "bicycle repair man integration" keeps popping up as a distinct
feature of jave-based PyDev, let it be known that other IDE's also have
this.
For example, non-java Eric has had " bicycle repair man" integration
for a very long time.

Personally, in spite of intense programming in python, I've never
encountered a real need for the bicycle gimmick.

Hi...

Yeap, bicycle repair man is used by many IDEs (that's what it was meant
for, right)?
As for refactoring, it is something you only miss after having used it
(and yes, the one provided by bicycle repair man is still in its
childhood when compared to tools available for java, but python
compensates that in its ease of programming -- until a certain point,
because if you had tools as good as the ones for java, it would make
programming in python even more enjoyable). And sure, you can do it
manually, but why bother when you have tools to do it?

Cheers,

Fabio

[malv]

It would not be misplaced in a python forum to draw your attention to
Bruce A. Tate's book:
"Beyond Java", publ O'Reilly Sep. 2005, ISBN 0-596-10094-9.

Bruce explains why: "... Java is abandoning its base, and conditions
are ripe for an alternative to emerge".

Personally, I have never felt any need in Python to have to fall back
on Java tools in order to program in a more efficient manner. The less
clutter, the better!

malv

[John J Lee]

On Mon, 5 Dec 2005, Fabio Zadrozny wrote:
[...]

Being java, does not worry me that much... there are already many vms aside
from suns (including gcj), and I think that if you do not want to program in
java, adding scripting layers for jython, jruby, etc should be fairly easy
(given that someone has the time to do it).

[...]

Sure, but it was the fact that the *core* is in Java I was thinking about.
I wonder how 'closed' it is. Probably I'm just creating FUD for myself.
I heard Phillip Eby say good things about its design, which can't be a bad
sign.
John

[seberino]

I fear licensing issues will keep away Emacs hackers who

might otherwise switch and make the platform more usable for other
Emacs refugees.

Please tell me what licensing issues you are referring to. Eclipse
should
be GPLv3.0 compatible I would guess.

Chris

[seberino]

Sure, but it was the fact that the *core* is in Java I was thinking about.
I wonder how 'closed' it is.

The code is under open source license. There are open source JVMs.
What is the
problem then with Java code?

[Trent Mick]

[John J. Lee wrote]

I now find it difficult to mis-type variable names in Emacs, since I
have F4 bound to dabbrev-expand. I also do standard things like using
query-replace when renaming. Actually, something like dabbrev-expand
is perhaps the one thing I would find indispensible switching to any
other editor -- I wonder if Eclipse/PyDev has it?

Komodo has that too -- we call it "word completion".

Trent

--
Trent Mick
Tr****@ActiveState.com

[Aaron Bingham]

Paul Boddie wrote:

[e-mail] wrote:

Eclipse, for example, performs like a dog on
my dual opteron workstation w/ 2GB of RAM, which is more than enough to
annoy me. I shouldn't have to wait more than about 1 second for an
editor to start and then open what is essentially a text file :-P.

And then, due to the excessive "project management" screen furniture,
have to edit it "through the keyhole"...

Hi Paul,

Did you ever try double clicking the editor tab? That zooms the editor
to take up the whole window and hids all the "screen furniture". You
can double click the tab again to get the furniture back.

Aaron Bingham

[Paul Boddie]

Aaron Bingham wrote:

Did you ever try double clicking the editor tab?

Hi Aaron! Yes, I think I worked that one out, but perhaps the
proliferation of panels containing tabs containing panels (containing
tabs...) is one of the things that really puts me off IDEs,
particularly Eclipse. I'm sure there's a keyboard shortcut for this
kind of thing, too, but I found it very easy to navigate off the tabs
for each of the editing windows and onto something else - the something
else not being immediately obvious.

Shouldn't you have something nice to say about Komodo instead, however?
;-)

Paul

[Trent Mick]

[Paul Boddie wrote]

Shouldn't you have something nice to say about Komodo instead, however?
;-)

Yah, I was just reminding Aaron of his fine-print legal requirements to
evermore only be able to extol the virtues of Komodo. Muuuwahahaha! :)

Trent

--
Trent Mick
Tr****@ActiveState.com

[jmdeschamps]

malv wrote:

This is probably a fair answer.
My experience: Two years ago I started with Boa till I discovered eric.
I have been with eric ever since. Eric uses Qt as GUI. I think both Qt
and wx enable you to do pretty much the same thing. I like the work
F.Lundh did on Tkinter, but every time I try, I get bogged down in the
tcl mess that it builds on. Take the example of the indispensible
datagrid: a piece of cake in both Qt and wxWidgets, a nightmare
otherwise.

Since a couple of weeks I made the tour of wing-ide, komodo and PyDev.
PyDev appears really to be a top heavy kludge. Perhaps OK for java
lovers but very laborious to set up and work with, this in spite of the
abundant hype & spam on this board. Wing-ide's debugger stops on
imagined errors where eric and komodo do allright. I could not get the
designer to run on komodo. So I'm back at eric. On eric you use the
superb Qt designer. If you run linux, you get Qt and PyQt with KDE. You
can keep on running gnome if you want. For windows, Qt4 is supposed to
be free. Further, very extensive and attractive extensions exist: qwt
and qwt3d for graphics.

This is my experience. If I find better, I'll change.
malv

Eclipse with Pydev is great with Tkinter apps.
I try to stick with Tkinter so Boa, Eric are not my cup of tea.

Some mainstream free IDE have problems with Tkinter's mainloop:
PythonWin IDLE, that I know of, may be others.

Eclipse with Pydev has been behaving excellently with Tkinter apps,
never freezing up, giving me the debugger, etc. Great stuff!

PS Yes, a Tkinter datagrid would be nice (sigh)

[hiddenharmony]

Well i use eric3 and i am pretty happy with it. Comes with integrated
refactoring, unittest, python shell, project browser, version control.
Do try it , avaialble under GPL.