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Python IDE for Mac OS X?
benbranch asks: "I am presently learning the Python programming language. The language itself is brilliant and seems very easy to pick up, however my problem is finding a decent IDE. I use Mac OS X (as Windows is excruciating), and though I love Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) all my work computers are Mac's. Can anyone advise me as too a good open source IDE for Mac? If there are any Python programmers out there using Macs, I would love to hear from you."
If I'm learning a language (as opposed to working on a project with others), I find I seldom need all the bells and whistles an IDE provides.
t ml
I know of two text editors that provide excellent Python integration.
* BBEdit: http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.sh
* Vim: http://macvim.org/OSX/index.php
I like Vim better for two reasons. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed
in large friendly letters on its cover.
My father is a blogger.
I know it's not open source, but Active State's KOMODO has a mac version now. The personal edition is pretty cheap.
I just use VIM, but I wouldn't consider it an IDE.
you can download and IDE(PythonIDE) and extras from MacPython
i'm in the same boat, i just got a powerbook for christmas and i downloaded the stuff last night, wanting to learn some python.
i had trouble with the install, all the latest stuff is for 10.3 and i've got 10.4. the wiki FAQ can get you up and going. also has a package manager and you can download PyObjC, which is a "bridge" (wrapper class?) so you can code in python and use cocoa elements. just getting my mac a week ago, i don't actually know what much of the above means, but thats where i'm heading.
i don't care
I think that you may want to take a look at Eclipse and download the python plug in. I have really enjoyed using Eclipse and the python plugin is pretty darn good. Plus you are only a step or two away from giving jython a test drive. I am running this on a Mac PB with no problems.
My
I'll just save everybody the hassle of going there: SPE - Stani's Python Editor. IMHO, this is by far the best open source free python editor. It blew me away. It is even nice for designing GUIs since it comes with wxGlade. Although, it does still have a few quirks, it is very usable.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
I dislike TextMate.
1. The undo functionality is crippled. Undo "undoes" one character at a time. This stops me from working the way I like to, which often involves adding a few lines, testing the code, and hitting undo if it didn't work out.
Er... well that's it actually. What is up with that undo functionality?
Someone please correct me if I am doing something wrong here. Maybe I am.
Ah well, back to TextWrangler.
Another nice thing about the license is that it is good for windows, mac, and linux versions per developer - so if you work on multiple platforms you can have the same IDE on all. If you need cross platform support, Komodo and Eclipse would be the two to consider, imho.
I've used (very little though) the OS X version of Komodo for some Perl stuff, and it seems very nice. One of these days I'll install it again and give it a really good test. I believe it does Perl, Python, and Ruby as part of the core, and has all the major IDE functions.
On OS X, TextMate is really coming along nicely, but it's not an IDE; just an editor. That's the editor used in the 15 minute Ruby-On-Rails demo video, for those who have seen it.
WingIDE is used extensively for most large commercial and otherwise software projects. Most of the developers at OSAfoundation.org use it.
Also, as a free alternative try winpdb:
http://www.digitalpeers.com/pythondebugger/
Its the most advanced python debugger i've used, but its not an IDE. I use WingIDE PRO for now, but anything that requires advanced debugging I switch to winpdb.
Leo, the Literate Editor with Outlines, kicks ass once you learn to use it.
It creates self-documenting code through its use of outlining. The use of outlining automagically encapsulates complex algorithms and ideas. One ends up with this bitchin' combination of structural/algorithmical/conceptual outline nodes and actual code.
I so very much wish that IDEs would start using LEO techniques. It would truly provide the best of all worlds.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
That said, you don't need either of them to use Objective-C. GCC comes with a standard "Object" that everything else can inherit from. The problem is that, while you get all of Objective-C, you get none of the lovely frameworks; You're stuck with the standard C library.
Actually, it's not quite that bad, because you also have all of the available C++ libraries.
Because the C++ and Objective-C extensions to C are orthogonal, you can actually write Objective-C++. This means you can use Objective-C for the core of your application and use C and C++, as appropriate, to do UI stuff, interface with peripherals, etc.
I did this years ago, actually, although I partitioned my code a little differently, because I like C++ and its strong compile-time typechecking. So I wrote applications in C++, but wrote some key components in Objective-C. Objective-C's late binding model is great for those scenarios where you want extreme flexibility.
The downside of this approach, of course, is that you -- and everyone who will have to maintain the code after you -- must know *both* Objective-C and C++. Syntactically, this would appear to be no problem for a competent C++ programmer, since you can literally learn all of Objective-C's syntax in a few minutes. There's just not that much of it. In practice, the classes-as-object-factory-objects, purely-late-binding, type-defined-by-interface approach of Objective-C requires thinking about objects in a different, very Smalltalkish way, so many C++ programmers do, in fact, have a tough time understanding it at first.
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