New Python Editors

Thanks to the knowledgeable people on the TurboGears mailing list I have discovered some new (and nice) editors for Python.

First is  SciTE which looks to be a competant light editor which understands source code.

Second is Cream: The easy-to-use free text editor for Windows and Linux, amazingly enough this is built on Vim and yet (for those who know Vi) it is almost unrecognisable as such. There are not editing modes, the keyboard shortcuts are standard (Ctrl+C for Copy to Clipboard etc).

Third is not so much an editor as a project environment around an editor. It is PIDA. While in early stages it looks like it could be amazing (for Linux). It can wrap around Cream, Vim, EVim or it's own editor based on GtkSourceView (but my Ubuntu has dependencies missing at present so I have not tried the internal editor yet).

Note I have not tried these for serious editing yet but I will be (and so far like the look of Cream best).

Comments

[Mike Watkins]

Cream might be one to go with; if you pine for editing modes, you can always switch.

I switched from using SciTE (was happy with this for some time) to Eric3 for some time but ultimately to vim. After getting used to vim modes, I do find it hard to go back. I had a look at Cream just out of interest sake and found it very capable -- its a nice integration of all sorts of vim add ons that would otherwise take you weeks of tweaking to get to -- but a little hard on my brain with modes switched off.

Others worth looking at

DrPython http://drpython.sourceforge.net/

SPE http://www.stani.be/python/spe/blog/

Eric3
http://www.die-offenbachs.de/detlev/eric3.html

But, in the end, I remain a vim convert. tags alone is worth it; plus the ability to tweak and waste any free spare time you might have had can not be discounted.

And, more seriously, it has excellent syntax highlighting, not just simple cases but also more complex cases such as CSS or Javascript *within* HTML.

[Kevin Dangoor]

If you're a Mac user, TextMate is really worth checking out. Once nice thing about TextMate's design is that it's very easy to extend the editor in a shell-script like manner, piping the text through whatever scripting language you want.

Lots of nice features, but it's Mac only, which always bites me when I need to do some work on Windows.

[Niki Spahiev]

Check python api support with scite

[leouser]

Dont forget to check out Leo, its written in python and gives you the power to structure your code the way you see fit. :)

[Stewart Midwinter]

I've used SciTE for some time now. One of its great features is its ability to execute the Python script you are editing; it will display output in a separate window, and if the app hangs, you can kill it and return to the editor. Surprisingly, a number of other so-called Python editors, like PyPE and even Eclipse, do not have this ability 'out of the box'.

[saluk]

Yeah, SciTE is a real treat. I've used it for about 2 years for all of my editing needs. The configuration files are quite extensive allowing you to tweak either general options or language specific options. The ability to run and kill a locked program has come in handy often. I've used other editors at times, but I always seem to come back to this one.

[gott]

I think you just need to install python2.4-gnome2-extras

[Scott Kirkwood]

I've used SciTE for about 4 years or so, mostly on Windows. I especially liked it because it has the same layout, for the most part, as Microsoft's Visual Studio (which I haven't used for years!). It's super configurable and takes a little while to get it configured, just the way you want. I'm now using it in Ubuntu linux and find it a tiny bit worse than the Windows experience, but not much (some keystrokes are gone or different, font's aren't quite as nice).
SciTE is definitely a solid cross platform choice, and is excelent for Python development.

[Bo]

I'd love to see a link to people's SciTE config file choices. I haven't used the editor for very much but I love how small it is. I'd appreciate seeing other configurations that were useable.

Also I cant say enough great things about Leo. Its so easy to organize things in it!

Bo

[Mike Watkins]

On Unix/linux (and Windows too... not all systems have it installed by default), to improve your SciTE you can always install the True Type font Andale Mono (do a google, you'll find a source for it) which is a fine little font for code editing.

I used to love SciTE for its compactness and display, but I have to say that vim with the 'zenburn' color scheme (a delight for the eyes), and some python specific tweaks, has made me far more productive.

Screen shot on this page:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=415

Key likes:

- tags - cursor on a word, press a hot key, and in a full height vertical window beside my editing window up opens the class or function in whatever file it resides in. My code, Python sources, whatever.

- syntax highlighting - SciTE and tools that use Scintilla offer nice highlighting; vims is even better.

- code completion - its no worse than SciTE but somewhat better

- plug-ins - vim is super extensible and there are so many prebuilt extensions out there, everything from a WebDav plugin that allows you to edit "files" from a Zope server remotely (I don't use it... just an example) to spell checking.

It really was worth the two weeks of off and on fiddling to get the environment just right.

I found with SciTE that I needed a rox or nautilus (I work on X windows, using xfce as my wm / desktop environment) file explorer open side by side and was constantly dragging files into SciTE... getting hand cramps from always moving to the mouse.

The keyboard centric nature of vim (if you want it to be... its there) allowed me to stop using my mouse so much, and with a little tweak here and there I can easily pull up file directors in the libraries I'm working on or application code or both at the same time, with just a few keystrokes instead of a whole lot of clicking.

Enough already... I simply wanted to share my experience not to convince but to indicate that there may be a payoff for those willing to stick with the initial learning curve. I know the first time I looked at vim I scratched my head and wondered why anyone would prefer such a tool... it wasn't until I dug deeper that I discovered it really can improve productivity.

As always, your mileage may vary!

[Mike Watkins]

Speaking of extensible, jedit is also quite nice and has some useful features - integration with remote site editing being one; I just didn't find it worth the big hit loading java entails; gvim / vim, like SciTE, starts instantly and consumes far fewer resources.

http://www.jedit.org/

[DaveW]

No time to reply to all these useful comments at the minute. But.

Gott, thanks that worked for getting PIDA editor to work.

Mike, Jedit has been my default editor for quite a few years. But I was looking for lighter.

Mike. I have tried vim several times. My typing is 2 finger so I don't benefit so much from the keyboard focus. I can use it and do as my console editor but not ready for full-time commitment.

[Chris]

What a surprise to me, when I discovered pida. That's just what I wanted for quite some time. Having vim (my favourite editor) bundled together with a little bit project-management and a taglist-browser (umm, this thing where it shows the names of functions, classes, etc.).
It's getting really comfortable when [1]pydiction (it's a vim-plugin) is installed. Then you can hit ctrl+n and it automatically completes python code (see [1] for details). That's just as comfortable as [2]ipython.
Now I've got a comfortable python shell which is ipython and a, as Dave said, python programming environment which is comfortable to use too.
Excellent!

[1]: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=850
[2]: http://ipython.scipy.org/

[ade]

I've been using Scite for about 5 years now. It's very useful once you've gone through the configuration and turned on the various features (tab per document, folding, the feature that tells you when your whitespace is inconsistent).

Having said that Pype has a tree view of your code that's quite useful on large Python modules. At some point in the next few weeks Phil Dawes is going to do a release of Bicycle Repairman (the refactoring tool for Python) and I can send in my patches to Pype that enable it have refactoring support.