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Best Cross-Platform, GUI Editor/IDE For Python?

Posted by timothy on from the go-my-son-and-seek-it-out dept.

What do you find is the best text editor for Python software development? I've tried several, and I'm always frustrated by the limitations of each. Eclipse is cool, but it's huge, and I've had multiple problems with corruption of the workspace. It got so bad at one point that every week or so I was tearing it down and recreating it. I spent so much time re-creating Eclipse's workspace that I found any productivity gains were lost due to Eclipse's brokenness. (Read more below.)

Morgan Greywolf continues: "I've also done the Emacs thing. Emacs is cool, but I found that I missed code browsing. So then I installed the Emacs Code Browser, Semantic and associated elisp code and found that it didn't work right half the time. I also seem to prefer either vi/Vim style editors, CUA-style editors, or WordStar-style editors.

Unfortunately, there are no GUI WordStar-style editors and none of them are cross-platform with Windows.

So, that left me with Scintilla/SCiTE. Which is nice, but, the code browsing doesn't seem to be able do autocomplete with PyGTK (to be fair, Eclipse's didn't work so well, either in that regard, at least not on the default Ubuntu install)

SCiTE loads fast, does nice Python highlighting, and has the ability to run code right from the browser. Unforutnately, unlike Eclipse or Emacs, there's no ability to do step/trace style debugging. *sigh*

So, okay, does anyone have any other ideas?"

4 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Seems like you're on windows by self+assembled+struc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I love TextMate on the Mac.

    There is a "version" for windows:
    http://www.e-texteditor.com/

    Have you tried that yet? Its got a free trial at the least.

  2. SPE by nbharatvarma · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I prefer Stani's Python Editor (SPE) when I work on OSX or Ubuntu.
    On Windows (even though SPE runs on it) I prefer PyScripter simply because that was the first IDE I used for python on Windows and I am fine with it.

    Both the IDEs have syntax checkers - this is especially useful if you write some of your code on an editor like vim/emacs/gedit etc. and want to start editing that code in IDEs.

    My advice is to choose an IDE and stick with it. Avoid shifting IDEs for python because of the indentation requirement and how each IDE might handle it differently.

    --
    ... and I shall strike upon thee with great vegeance, furious anger and a slightly positive karma.
  3. BBEdit by Alinraz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's not x-platform (it runs on OSX), but it's probably the best editor I've ever used (and this includes Eclipse, Emacs, VIM, SNiFF+, MS DOS's Edit, VisualStudio, various Borland editors, Metrowerks, and just about every mainstream editor included in various distributions of Linux).

    It supports Python as well as dozens of other languages; I've used C/C++, Perl, shell scripting, PHP and HTML on it; looking at the menu I count 42 different languages or variants. It supports multiple SCM types, including CVS and Subversion.

    http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

    Even better: the company is great. They came out with a new version 8 months after I bought the previous version, and sent me a free key to upgrade!

  4. Re:Some of what I've looked at and use by khanyisa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And before I forget - Komodo does things I've seen no other editor do as well, like syntax highlighting and autocompletion on code from one format embedded inside others (e.g. CSS code with XHTML, Python code embedded in HTML templates, etc, etc)