What's the best IDE for Python on Mac OS X 10.5

[David Guerin]

Hey all,

Ok so I have this project to do and hopefully I will learn Python well
in the process.
I'm just wondering what's the best IDE to use for Python on OS X?
I'll be using Twisted quite a bit as well.

I'm not really looking for anything in particular just something that
makes life easy...:)

Which is the best out of these?

Eclipse
Netbeans
XCode (Apple's IDE)
IDLE
TextMate (An advanced text editor)

Any help or suggestions would be great?

Regards
Dave

[Harry Van Haaren]

Hey,

Your asking for opinions?

I prefer to stay away from heavy-duty IDE's like netbeans/Eclipse for Python.

Geany is my favorite. It doesn't look like they have pre-built OsX binaries..
but if your experienced in building software that's probably not a problem.

TextMate would be my choice out of the list you posted. (Most like geany).

-Harry

[David Guerin]

Thanks for the advice,

Yes I'm mostly looking for opinions really.

I didn't really want to go with Netbeans and definitely not Eclipse (way to heavy and slow for my liking).

Textmate is very nice to use on OS X but I'll have a look into Geany.

The list I posted earlier was the applications that I have installed, I'm opening to trying something new if it makes life easier.

Regards

Dave

[Uldis Bojars]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Harry Van Haaren<harry...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I prefer to stay away from heavy-duty IDE's like netbeans/Eclipse for
> Python.
>
> Geany is my favorite. It doesn't look like they have pre-built OsX
> binaries..

Advanced text editors like Emacs and VIM can be another option.
Strictly speaking, they are not IDEs, but can accomplish your code
editing tasks just as well.

I am using MacVIM for most tasks. There must be plugins that help you
write code in Python, though I am not currently using any. If you
decide to explore these tools, [1] may contain some useful
information.

[1] http://dancingpenguinsoflight.com/2009/02/python-and-vim-make-your-own-ide/

Uldis

[ http://captsolo.net | http://twitter.com/CaptSolo ]

[Padraig Kitterick]

This is a great tutorial for setting up MacVIM as a Python IDE,
including ctags support, code completion, etc:

http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/05/24/vim-as-python-ide/

[David Guerin]

I have one requirement that I did not mention before,
I will need to create a UI, nice and graphical, is there an IDE that
can help with this?

Regards
Dave

[Karl Stanley]

Depends on what you want to do. I am mostly writing django apps at
present, so I use aptana with the pydev plugin. Being built on eclipse,
it's not fast and it uses loads of memory, but it allows you to edit
css, js, html and python files with variable name completion etc. and
even a debugger should you want it. It's also handy in that it behaves
more-or-less the same on macs and PCs. A minor annoyance is that pydev's
preferred directory structure for projects is not the same as django's.
You can probably configure it that way but I haven't figured out how.

For non-django stuff I usually just use vim. I haven't written anything
big this way though so I don't know how vim would scale to something
with hundreds of .py files in loads of different directories.

Karl

> Thanks for the advice,
>
> Yes I'm mostly looking for opinions really.
>
> I didn't really want to go with Netbeans and definitely not Eclipse
> (way to heavy and slow for my liking).
>
> Textmate is very nice to use on OS X but I'll have a look into Geany.
>
> The list I posted earlier was the applications that I have installed,
> I'm opening to trying something new if it makes life easier.
>
>
> Regards
> Dave
>
>
> On 7 Jul 2009, at 15:09, Harry Van Haaren wrote:
>
>> Hey,
>>
>> Your asking for opinions?
>>
>> I prefer to stay away from heavy-duty IDE's like netbeans/Eclipse for
>> Python.
>>

>> Geany <http://www.geany.org/Download/Releases> is my favorite. It

[Padraig Kitterick]

In my experience, the only usable UI creator that is usable is the
PyQT interface builder. Other than that, I don't know of any UI
builder that doesn't suck.

[Michael Twomey]

If you are interested in desktop UI programming on the mac I
*strongly* recommend sticking with Apple's objective-c (via xcode) and
interface builder initially. Objective-c is generally surprisingly
pleasant and if you want to build interfaces which mac people like you
are kind of stuck with cocoa, since they smell non-cocoa based
interfaces from a mile away :)

However all is not lost, since objective-c is really a quasi-dynamic
interpreter with message passing in disguise you can use pyobjc which
is a bridge to objective-c. This allows you to mix python in (or write
the entire app in python).

As an added bonus cocoa and interface builder are the most
sophisticated toolset I've come across for interface development (mmm,
data binding).

If your goal is cross platform desktop development I echo the pyqt
sentiment, though I'd examine the possibility of web development
first.

Oh, and TextMate is the editor you want for general purpose code
editing. TextMate + ack plugin + pyflakes plugin = bliss :)

mick

[David Guerin]

Hey,
Thanks for the in depth reply.

The UI that I will be trying to build, I would hope that it can be cross platform, if I did build it with Cocoa, it would be just stuck with the python backend.
(Although building UIs on Mac is very very nice  as you have said, really do like how Interface Builder connects to Xcode, and dragging and dropping components for the UI, much better than in Netbeans for Java or Visual Studio for Windows.)

Cross platform is my main concern at the moment, If I have to I'll just use a Windows or Ubuntu computer to get the development done but I would really like to stick with Mac. So I'll have a look at pyqt as you suggest.

Those other tools with Textmate sound interesting, I tried out pychecker yesterday, but it gave me a lot of errors, but some of them were not errors and my code stopped working. So I have kind of stopped using it already.
I'll have a look into the other tools anything that makes life easier is a must :)

Thanks again for your help

Regards
Dave

[Goncalo Gomes]

On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, David Guerin wrote:

> Those other tools with Textmate sound interesting, I tried out pychecker yesterday, but it gave me a lot of errors, but some of them were not
> errors and my code stopped working. So I have kind of stopped using it already.
> I'll have a look into the other tools anything that makes life easier is a must :)

I used the PyQT Designer and it's quite nice. It's probably not an IDE in
the same sense as Netbeans/Visual Studio, but it allows you to make rich
and very good looking GUIs which can be saved as an XML file to load from
python using the PyQT package modules.

As for code writing, I write almost all of my code using vim. Haven't felt
the need to use anything else, honestly, but I must say the urls mentioned
before about setting up a python environment for vim were quite an
interesting read!

Cheers,
/GG

[David Guerin]

I'll have a look with that went I get making the UI, just need to get the majority of the back end up and running first.

Which leads me to my next question, for those of you that use Textmate, how do you pass command line arguments to the python script from within Textmate when you run it?

This is the code that should read in the values and assign them to variables

if __name__ == "__main__":

    if len(sys.argv) != 3:

     print "Arguments: <bootstrap port> <gossip port>"

       sys.exit()

    

    globals.config['bootstrap_port'] = int(sys.argv[1])

    globals.config['gossip_port'] = int(sys.argv[2])

Cant find a way to pass in values to the sys.argv array from within Textmate when you run it.

I have tried to find the answer online but to no avail, any help would be great.

Regards

Dave