Rediscovering IDE’s

Fifteen years ago I was an IDE weeny, I did lots of development in early versions of MS Visual Studio in C++. Then I changed jobs and found myself doing lots of multi-language development across Windows and lots of different Unix systems, in this world IDE’s just did not work. So I moved to doing everything in Emacs. I have been using Emacs ever since. Until now …

The software team at my work are big on Java and big on Eclipse. I have ignored Eclipse because I have always seen it as a Java tool. However, over the last few days I found that it is possible (using PyDev and Subclipse plugins) to turn Eclipse into a really nice Python development environment. I am converted. Code completion, integrated PyLint code checking, integrated python debugger with object browser, really flexibly screen layout and proper support for using multiple monitors (I always use two monitors on my desktop environment, and it works on Linux/Windows and Mac OSX (my laptop environment).

So if anyone wants to get into Gramps development but are used to GUI based IDE’s, then give Eclipse a go.

If only it would support Emacs key bindings. Well, you can have everything.

Richard

4 Comments

  • shura

    Richard, I’d like to try this out. Are there any tricks to get these plugins working with Eclipse?

    On Debian there’s a lot of eclipse-related packages. Could you tell what’s needed for python work?

  • Brian Matherly

    I’ve been using Eclipse since I started hacking Gramps. I wouldn’t use anything else. I remember once Don was trying to debug something with print statements. I stepped through the code with the python debugger in Eclipse and got right to the root of the problem.

    All you need is to add pydev and subclipse to the Eclipse update system and install them:

    http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/
    http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x

  • Don

    I guess it is time for me to give this a try. I’ve never used an IDE before. When I left software engineering, we were still using dbx and cfront to debug mangled C code. Debuggers were pretty useless.

    I haven’t programmed in any language other than Verilog (hardware description language), perl, and python over the past 10 years. None of these environments had a real IDE (until pydev under eclipse).

    The problem I’ve always had with some environments like this is that they want to make you do things their way, not necessarily the way I want to do things.

    But maybe it is time for me to leave the late 80’s and early 90’s.

  • pepesmith

    I’ve been using cream as my editor on most of my pygtk projects :)..Its good that you’ve found some nice IDE eh?..and thanks for posting too, I think i have to give Eciples a try with that pydev plugins 🙂

    More power !

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