In Search Of … A Python IDE

I’ve finally gotten started on developing an open-source desktop version of The Scalculator, which has its roots in a moderately popular perl web app I wrote many years ago.

After looking at a few options, I settled in on Python as the language and QT as the graphical toolkit – and after a few days of development I thought I might put a little effort into finding an IDE in hopes it would help me be a bit more productive.

Keep in mind I am not a professional developer, python or otherwise, so please keep my thoughts in that context. I’m probably looking more toward a more powerful text editor than a full-fledged IDE compared to a more professional developer.

What I wanted

In very rough order of what is important to me in an IDE:

Easy to learn. This is the main thing. I want to be able to start coding almost right away. I’m willing to invest an hour or maybe two into getting started – and more later for advanced features. However, I don’t want to have to take a course just to edit a file and run it. (This immediately rules out emacs.)

Basic Text Editor Stuff. These are things that are in any decent text editor: auto-save, customizable font and size, multiple files open in tabs, force spaces instead of tabs, and so forth.

Code Highlighting and Syntax Support. Yeah, this is a basic requirement. Highlight keywords, strings, constants and the like. Show matching braces, indent correctly and so forth. Most text editors support this to a pretty good degree already.

Custom commands. There are several routine commands I like to run while developing. Things like pylint, epydoc, and bzr. It’s no big deal to jump out to a shell real quick to run this, but it sure would be nice to just push a button right in the IDE. Something some text editors offer.

Auto-completion. Because I am new to Python and QT I have to often look up objects and methods in the documentation. That’s not too bad, because there is very good documentation for both – but again, it sure would be nice to have that stuff come right up in the IDE.

Another point on autocompletion is that I am frequently changing the objects in my project as I (hopefully) find better solutions. Autocompletion can help make sure I use the right names, rather than the ones I had yesterday.

Object outlining. I mean that thing where it shows a little tree of the objects and methods in the file. I find that helpful to jump around quickly in the source to the specific area I would like to work on.

There are a host of other little nice things to have, but they aren’t things I’m really worried about as part of the selection criteria.

One thing that you might think is missing on my list is some sort of debugger support. This is because I just through print statements everywhere when debugging. This doesn’t mean I would turn my nose up at a smooth debugging interface right in the IDE, just that I don’t personally consider it a deal-breaker.

What I Got

I tried lots of possibilities, some were OK, some were poop, a few were nice.

Geany – This is ” a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment.”

Geany

It is very nice, almost no learning curve and I used it as my main IDE while I was evaluating the other options. It was sort of the “reference standard” – the competition had to do everything and more than Geany did, and it couldn’t be much harder to learn to use.

The autocompletion is not very smart, but still helpful – it is limited to objects in the code, not library objects, and is the name only. I also like the faint line that marks 80 characters.

If you don’t have time to start evaluating IDEs, then just use Geany and get on with the coding.

Verdict: A solid, if very basic, solution.

Netbeans – I had been using this for some other development. With nbPython, Netbeans is supposed to support Python.

[No screenie because I uninstalled this about a week ago.]

You have to set up Mercurial and grab the right version of nbPython, and then find a proper build of Netbeans that will work against that version of nbPython. I got that much working once I think, but even then ran into lots of minor problems. It was a few weeks ago, and I didn’t think to write them down. Sorry.

Netbeans is a nice IDE in general, but just not for Python. Perhaps in the future?

Verdict: Not ready yet. (to be fair, it doesn’t claim to be.)

Eclipse – I downloaded a new release from the website, and was very excited because the promise of integrating QT, bzr, and pydev was very enticing.

[No screenie because I uninstalled this in a rage yesterday.]

It took a bit of time to get everything installed – but after a few tries I got it all fired up. Here’s the problem with Eclipse as far as I can tell: using the IDE is at least twice as complicated as the program you are trying to write.

It’s damn near impossible to bring in existing files into a (PyDev) Project. It turned out to be easier just to re-create the project and cut and paste the code into the new project, file by file.

Even then, I could never change the default directory which I made a mistake on when I first entered. You can force it with the -data switch from the command line, but I’m not sure how that worked because …

…not one single time was I able to re-open the project! I imported it once, and re-created it twice – with a re-install of Eclipse in the middle. Never was I able to re-open the project, though it looked alright on disk. The “Open Project” menu option was always grayed out.

In a similar vein, every time I opened Eclipse all the preferences for things like pydev and bzr integration were blank, and I had to set them up all over again.

I spent several hours on this and eventually gave up. I asked in #python if anyone used this, and everyone pretty much laughed at me. :(

Now in the working session, before I closed Eclipse, things looked nice. The integration with pylint was remarkable, and convinced me to use it often. So, I’m glad for that.

Verdict: Big talk, small walk.

Stani’s Python Editor (SPE) – I ran into a few people mentioning this and gave it a whirl. It worked alright, but documentation is very lacking. There are a couple of “donate” widgets that clutter up the interface, and as far as I could tell the manual is only offered to “donors”? I felt like I was back in shareware-land.

Stani

SPE has lots of nice features specifically for python development:

• A “PyDoc” tab (per file) showing the module documentation.
• A “Index” tab (bottom pane) that uses pydoc tags to jump around in project source.
• A “Shell” tab (bottom pane) that has a convenient python shell running.

The “PyDoc” tab is slightly marred because I use epydoc. The links in the menus for things like “Python Documentation” lead to 404s, because the pages have changed. Seems like both these issues could be fixed through exposing some preferences – this is a weakness in general throughout SPE – too many “nice touches” seem to be hard-coded.

Similar to the “PyDoc” tab was a “UML” tab. This doesn’t do anything for me, but maybe a more complex project would find it of use? My stuff is generally one class per module, so a UML diagram of a single class isn’t really too helpful.

There is almost no support that I could find for SPE. I ran into a problem (I think I wanted to add a custom run command or something), and couldn’t find anywhere to ask about it. The main SPE site is just the author’s blog, and isn’t really focused on SPE per se.

Verdict: Flawed, but still worth a look.

Komodo Edit – Hooray! This is the first thing that beats Geany hands down!

Komodo Edit

There is almost no learning curve. Custom commands are dead simple and well documented. It brought in the existing files straight away. It has the 80-character line.I like the dotted lines it draws to show indention levels too.

Autocompletion is about the same as in Geany, I keep seeing errors about name resolution in the status bar – maybe something needs to be fixed to give better results?

Verdict: The best open source solution I found.

Wing IDE Professional – This is a commercial, Python-specific, IDE. However, they have a very interesting offer of a free license if you are only using the IDE on public open-source projects. I thought it might be nice to take advantage of this offer and see how the open-source alternatives stacked up against a commercial offering.

Wing IDE

The requirements are very modest, basically you have to present a project with source code available under an OSI-approved license, and the website has to describe the project and show up in Google or some other search engine.

You then print out a form to sign and you can mail/fax/email it back in. I did this and got a license key back in about 5 hours – most of which was night-time Stateside. Very fast turnaround – and keep in mind my project is very small, on Launchpad, and only me as a developer. (You are welcome to join me, though! :) )

There is only a i386 .deb available for install, but it will work if you force the architecture. You also need to install “enscript” first as the package does not resolve this dependency.

You can tell from the screenshot that the interface is more complex. However, there is good help, and it’s the kind of help where you can click on the link and it opens the dialog that the help is talking about – that is nice.

Also, importing existing files into a new project was no problem – Wing did some analysis and found some tabs in the files (which I thought I had long since gotten rid of). That’s a nice feature.

I went to set up some custom commands, called OS Commands in Wing. These are nice and easy enough to create, but not quite as nice as Run Commands in Komodo – the major failing is the inability to get some user input for the command.

For example, in Komodo I can do something like this:

bzr commit -m "%(ask:QUESTION:DEFAULT)"

And upon execution get a prompt (QUESTION) to enter a bit of text (filled initially with “DEFAULT”) for the commit. I couldn’t find how to do this from Wing.

I also tried to lauch a command using sudo and it got stuck running. The terminate option didn’t do anything. Eventually, I just shut down the whole IDE.

I did use Wing for an entire day, and may stick with it. I certainly haven’t gotten into all the niches, but it seems worth the effort.

Verdict: If you don’t mind it not being open-source, a very nice python-specific IDE.

The Summary

I will continue to give Wing IDE a chance over the next few days, because I want to see if the more advanced features help development.

If I don’t get anything from those advanced features, then it will be  Komodo Edit. For the intersection of features offered by Komodo Edit and Wing IDE, I give a slight advantage to Komodo Edit.