Eclipse and pydev plugin

Since Sunday I have really tried to move myself into the Eclipse IDE. There are still some warts, but for the most part I am actually liking it.

The good:

• pydev includes pylint, which can automatically scan your code and let you know of typos etc.
• It's open source, extensible, lots of plugins and users
• It's written in Java, so I have some hope being able to extend it myself (even though I've never programmed in Java)
• The outliner is useful when you have large python classes/files
• The framework hanldes a lot of stuff "for free"

The bad:

• A LOT of new terminology and different ways of doing things compared to most other IDEs I've used.
• It's written in Java, and it shows in the UI (controls don't work exactly like the standard Windows controls)
• pydev is still a little primitive
• pylint does not pick up the PYTHANPATH set up for pydev
• The debugger is slow
• Haven't been able to break at breakpoint when debugging chandler

Essential plugins:

• pydev (for python development)
• subclipse (for subversion support - Eclipse comes with cvs support out of the box)
• solar-eclipse (some editor enhancements, like Alt+/ autocomplete from emacs)

pydev plugin

I started looking at the warts in pydev, and actually managed to fix one bug about the indentation that was driving me crazy. I'll need to clean it up and perhaps do some additional work, like fixing the PYTHONPATH issue for pylint.

Update: Wrote two patches that were already accepted and checked in by pydev maintainer. One makes indentation a little bit smarter when editing multiline func args, tuples, lists and dicts. The other fixes the PyLint PYTHONPATH. -- HeikkiToivonen - 05 May 2005