A friend asked what IDE I’m using for Python these days. Because it was already in use at my new job, I’m using Eclipse. Here are my impressions so far.

One co-worker doesn’t use Eclipse because “it’s a pig”, but I have found it to be quite snappy, and very native feeling. And it uses far less memory than Firefox porked up with all the interesting extensions.

For Python, the PyDev plug-in is pretty good. It has code completion, although I haven’t found it very useful with Python’s dynamic nature. One annoyance: Ctrl-Tab is bound to re-tabbing the code or something, and I can’t seem to re-bind it back to switching among the editor windows. I tried the debugger, but found it to be unusably slow, for example, 10 seconds to single-step to the next line. More recent builds claim to have fixed some simple things to speed that up, but I haven’t tried it again.

I would have preferred to use a native Python IDE, but the free ones still don’t seem ready to me. I still have high hopes for SPE, and am keeping my eye on it. One thing I’d like about SPE is since it’s in Python, I could get in there and contribute to its development. (Of course, one thing I like about Eclipse is that since it’s in Java, I can’t fool myself into thinking that I can get in there and contribute to its development!)

Things I like about Eclipse:

• It’s a serious project run with discipline. For example, here’s the page about the recent 3.1.2 release, complete with goals, milestones, list of bugs fixed, and so on.
• It provides the closing paren when you open the paren, but when the time comes, if you also type the closing paren, it cleverly skips over the automatically provided one, instead of leaving you with two.
• It’s very professional. Too often, free IDE’s look like everyone and their brother added a coulple of menu items, until you have a monstrosity that collapses under its own weight. Considering all that it can do, Eclipse has a very small menu tree.
• It’s free.

Things I don’t like about Eclipse:

• I haven’t found a way to jump to the next search result, either within a file (what Microsoft tools would have bound to F3), or in a multi-file search (F8). There are next-result arrows on the search view, but I want a keystroke I can use in an editor to jump to the next result.
• Also on search: the Find/Replace dialog has Whole Word as an option, but File Search does not. WTF?
• The icon is a blue circle, just like Thunderbird: one of them has to change. It’s too confusing.
• Eclipse seems to have gotten over its phobia of dealing with files as files, though some of that still shows through. Open File is a menu item, but it isn’t mapped to Ctrl+O, for example. And for some reason, the files I open from my project have line numbers displayed, but a file I open with Open File does not?
• Another thing about the file system: if I update my tree with Subversion on the command line, the next file search I do in Eclipse tells me that there were problems (because the project navigator is no longer in sync with the file system). Then I have to go to the navigator and refresh it. Why doesn’t it just refresh it? What’s the big deal?
• I can’t turn off Java IDE features. I don’t code in Java, so I don’t want to see Java features. I can’t uninstall the Java plugins, so there are lots of choices about Java in my face. Even worse: why bug me about plug-in development? I know it’s important to Eclipse, but can’t I declare once and for all that I am not developing a plug-in, and lighten the environment or something?

One recommendation: The GotoFile plug-in is great for finding files within your project. Open Resource already let you type in names to find files, but GotoFile lets you use discontiguous characters. “mcozpl” could find “MyCoolWhizzyPlugin.py” for example.

I had been using the Subclipse plug-in for Subversion support, but found it to be both very slow and unreliable. I’ve gone back to the command line to do my updates and commits, which works fine so long as I remember to do a refresh from my project navigator. The plug-in is still back there decorating my navigator, but it didn’t seem to add much value to the meat and potatoes of Subversion use.

All in all, after a number of earlier attempts to “get” Eclipse, this time it has stuck, and I am productive with it. SPE is probably in my future, but not yet.