blundis on 2010/03/26 11:32:

Hi Davy.

Although not a proper IDE i use and love the free Komodo Edit for Windows. It has all the functions you expect of a code-editor (syntax highlighting and so on) and also let's you run and store commands (such as a command to run the currently open file with python).

wisty on 2010/03/26 13:18:

Sorry, latest version here: http://code.google.com/p/pyscripter/

tartley on 2010/03/26 14:00:

A simple recommendation: I know geek-famous Python people who like Wing.

Allow me to take this opportunity re-tell the great IDE anecdote from the offices of my current employer.

All of our developers choose their own IDE. Amusingly, we soon ended up with literally about nine different IDE's in use on a single project. We used Visual Studio for Windows GUI design, but for coding we used Wing, Komodo, Eclipse, Emacs, Vi, Textpad, etc. You name it. Surprisingly, this caused no problems, and everyone was happy.

We pair-program on 100% of our production code. As always with pairing, it's a good idea to make the least experienced person do the typing. That way they really have to understand what's going on, they can't just nod and glaze over. So everyone quickly learns everything about the whole project and all the technologies it uses. This applies to IDEs too. We all quickly got to learn lots about each other's IDEs - how could you not do, typing at each other's for 8 hours a day, with a bona-fide expert user of that IDE sitting right in your lap to ask questions and show you how it works.

Every few weeks, someone would realise that as they learned more about various different IDE's, they had grown to appreciate one of them more than their own chosen one, and they would switch.

After a while, an interesting thing happened. Slowly, one at a time, over a period of a couple of months, all but two of our developers chose to migrate to either Emacs or Vi. Nobody pushed this. Nobody announced it, or tried to persuade anyone to switch. It just happened. Each individual chose for themselves. They each decided that, on reflection, these text editors were just the best of all the different IDE's they had seen. I regard this as an example of pair programming spreading knowledge.

A lot of people don't believe or understand this. It's worth remembering that both Vi and Emacs do a much better job at all the IDE-like features than most people know. They do syntax highlighting, or 'go to definition', or code completion, or browsing documentation straight from the code. You just have to know how to turn it on or configure it. This is a pain to figure out - but as the anecdote above shows, once you get over that barrier, they are extremely good at it.

There are other important benefits. These editors will work no matter what language you are programming in. If you are used to working on Windows, and one day you buy a Mac, or switch to Linux, then they will work there too. Never again will you have to ask "I'm starting new programming language X, which IDE should I use?" This is a choice that will last the rest of your lifetime, no joke.

Clearly they are not everyone's cup of tea, but I'd urge you to at least consider the option.

Cosmologicon on 2010/03/26 15:09:

While I'm sure that if I had a guru over my shoulder for weeks teaching me to use Emacs or Vim I'd probably learn to love it, the learning curve and initial time investment required is enough that I've never really wanted to try. Plus I'd be terrified that if I ever stopped using it for a month or two, when I came back I'd have to relearn everything.

So I guess I've never used an IDE, and I really like gedit, because it does exactly what I want and nothing more. It has all of ten options, and I've never felt the need for an eleventh.

Oooh, eleventh. That's a theme.

georgek on 2010/03/26 19:01:

I've been using vim more recently, and like the text editing with it, but I found it has a major problem with respect to Python -- it doesn't have a nice way of running the Python script and seeing the stdout within vim, because vim doesn't support asynchronous output. There are a couple of solutions for that which require extra work that I'm planning to tackle at some point, but for now I'm sticking with my favorite combo -- Leo + SciTE. 

daftspaniel on 2010/03/27 05:58:

Wow - thanks for all the input :-)

Right fast choice made - I have gone for Komodo Edit which I have used before. It has sufficient features and is easy enough to pick up again.

Good luck all!

Davy

ninmonkey on 2010/03/27 10:06:

I had used vi, vim , but I converted to scite for daily use. If I had vim setup with all those features, I might be using it.

Scite , or an editor that uses scintilla (scite's text widget), or equivalent. Scite alone doesn't have class browser, etc... but works for smaller projects.

Geany is more of an IDE, class browser. Plugins.

http://www.geany.org/   
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

milker on 2010/03/27 13:49:

@ninmonkey  Geany is a cool tools. Thank you.

tartley on 2010/03/27 16:09:

richard: I'm pretty sure the only vim autocomplete I use is the built-in one, which I think is called omnicomplete. Hit Ctrl-n or Ctrl-p for the next/prev match at any time. It looks like this: http://tartley.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/deja-vu-sans-mono-9.png

If you fancy something a little smarter, a friend of mine did some work on pysmell, a multi-editor plugin to do intelligent autocomplete for Python by type inferencing, eg. if you call .flush() on a variable, then it must be an instance of either Buffer or Toilet, so autocomplete on that variable gives you all the  methods and attributes from those classes. Pretty cool.

tartley on 2010/03/27 16:14:

Oh, and, the vim plugin 'pyflakes' is AWESOME.