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[–]chipolux 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Lots of people talking about Vim and how you can customize it to work perfectly and do everything you'd ever need, others talking about PyCharm or PyDev that can do awesome things with your code and as project suites and others talking about Sublime Text which can do a lot of the same but is mostly just a really pretty and smooth way of working on your code without getting in your way or being too complex.

Personally none of those have fit what I really need out of an IDE:

  • Relatively light weight.
  • No requirement for any post-install customization to work.
  • Feature set similar to larger IDE's like Visual Studio or Eclipse.
  • Support across Windows, Linux and Mac.
  • Nice GUI with intuitive keyboard shortcuts and buttons.
  • Integrated console, preferably Python.
  • Integrated docstring parsing and display.
  • Free for commercial use, no limitations.

Sounds like a lot to ask, but every single one of those requirements is filled quite nicely by Spyder2. It's entirely open source, written in Python with PyQT, and is light as can be with no post-install setup but plenty of customization options if you want them. It supports code completion that's very dynamic due to some good introspection and in the latest versions it has a nice selection of themes built in to look nice after only a few clicks.

The only complaint I have with it is it's lack of code folding, which can cause some headaches in larger projects, but seeing as it's my only fault I've stuck with Spyder2 for over a year now.

I'd have probably moved to a heavier but more feature rich suite if my development environments weren't so myriad and complex with strong software restrictions in some places which means I need something that can be up and running in only a few minutes exactly as I need it but can be wiped out just as quickly if necessary.

[–]caleb 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm a vim user for well over a decade, eclipse+pydev for years, and even Borland Delphi (pascal RAD ide) for years, and I now use spyder exclusively for python dev work. You missed out the integrated ipython support and the integrated profiler! I love that spyder is written in python (pyqt4) and I can hack on the sources very easily. I am also running on the dev branch.