It's hard to write anything about open source integrated development environments without covering Eclipse, which has a huge developer community and countless plugins available, allowing you to customize it to meet nearly any need you can imagine. I find Eric to be a great, lighweight, yet full-featured programming environment, and learning it can help the quality of your code and gets you familiar with conventions common to all IDEs.Įric is available under the GPL version 3. If you're new to IDEs as a concept, Eric can take some time to master, and you might question whether learning an IDE specific to just Python is worth the time investment. I personally like the integrated task list function. It also has a Qt form preview function, which is useful if you're developing a Qt GUI for your application. The features of Eric are similar to other IDEs: brace matching, code completion, a class browser, integrated unit tests, and so on. Named after Monty Python's Eric Idle, Eric is actually written in Python using the Qt framework.Įric makes use of Scintilla, a source code editing component used in a number of different IDEs and editors, and which is also available as the stand-alone SciTE editor. EricĮric is a common favorite IDE for Python editing. All are cross-platform, so they can be used on your operating system of choice. Here are some of the most popular options available to Python developers. As you gain experience, you usually develop an opinion about which features you consider essential for your development needs, and even those sometimes depend on what project you're working on. The line between an advanced text editor and a slim IDE isn't always clear. Others have debug tools, instant logic and error checking, and so on.

For instance, most IDEs keep a cache of class, function, and variable names so they can be autocompleted quickly. An IDE is essentially a text editor, but with lots of additional features, sometimes specific to just one or two programming languages, to help the programmer keep track of the project as a whole. But a lot of power users working on large projects with complex code bases prefer an integrated development environment (IDE) to the text editor plus terminal combination. Some people prefer a basic text editor, like Emacs, Vim, or Gedit, all of which can be extended with features like syntax highlighting and autocomplete. To edit Python programs, you have a number of options.

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