A Couple Python IDEs on Linux

Journal stoolpigeon's Journal: A Couple Python IDEs on Linux 2

Journal by stoolpigeon on Thursday January 31, 2013 @11:23AM

I'm kind of an IDE junky. I really like messing around with them and trying them out. This probably offends real programmers who are actually productive. I don't blame you and I'm sorry.

So I've never used KDevelop before on account of I've never really written much in C or C++. In fact while I'm being offensive to those of you with legit skills the biggest thing I ever did in C was part of a project I did in VB 6.0 There was one section I couldn't accomplish in VB so I wrote a little thing in C that I could call from the VB code. I don't even remember what it was - it's been a few years now. I wonder if I wrote about it in my journal here? I may go look later. I'm the programming equivalent of the rich white kid with all the 'bling' who styles himself as a hard core rapper guy.

Well, I'm on Reddit and there is a post in r/python about a python plugin for KDevelop. And as I'm investigating that I see that there is also one for PHP. The PHP plugin must have been stable a while back because it is available via the Fedora repos. The Python one is pretty new so I had to compile that sucker from source. I felt pretty manly doing that. (manly is a bad word for this but I can't come up with another one that describes how it made me feel. i'm sure this is a product of my upbringing and culture and not due to a personal failing on my part.)

Anyway - it's cool. I mean really cool.

I got it installed, played with getting KDEDIRS right, running kbuildsycoca4 a few times and then figuring out how to get this variable set right in a permanent fashion - and then I could use it. I fire up KDevelop, click on "New Project" and I see that I have choices, one being "Python". Upon choosing Python I learn that I have even more choices. Simple Python Application, New Django project and Simple Qt GUI application using Designer. Verbiage and capitalization inconsistencies aside I was pretty pleased to see more choices than I would have expected and doubly so over the last. I chose it and created a project called test.

What did I get in my project called test? Well again, a whole lot more than I expected. It created 3 files. test.py, mainwindow.ui and mainwindow.py and it was capable of running right out of the box. This is pretty freaking cool in my opinion. When you run it there's a little window with a push button and a progress bar. Pushing the button increments the progress bar. Really - it doesn't matter what it does, the point is that everything is there that one needs to get the ball rolling I really, really like that.

It does bunches and bunches of all the IDE stuff you would expect. Syntax coloring, code completion, debugging stuff - all that junk. I'm pretty impressed. I'm a brand loyal person. I love feeling like I belong to a team. This is not a positive attribute on a number of levels but I don't care. It's a truth about myself I've learned to accept. So I really like the idea of becoming a more KDE person by using KDevelop. I've also dropped pidgin for Telepathy and learned to embrace Dolphin. I'm all about the buy in. Though I do not browse with Konqueror. I can only go so far. And my love affair with google takes precedence here. But now I'm rambling.

Another Python IDE that I haven't looked at in a long, long time is Ninja IDE. It comes with a dark them as the default setting and I feel like a rebellious hacker type person straight out of a Gibson story every time I fire it up. It's a Python IDE written in Python. I respect that. I haven't messed with it a lot but it is available via the Fedora repos now and at some point I may give it a more serious spin. I wondered how it would go when they first started and they seem to be hanging in there and building a nice product. The name as a recursive acronym thing is annoying but I'm willing to overlook it. They have packages for Lin, Win and Mac. How nice is that? Try it out. Write a plugin for it.

So with all that Valve is doing your Linux PC can now be your complete solution for development and entertainment. So many good tools just sitting there waiting to be used.

**Technical Note about the KDEDIRS thing. I am (if you read these regularly you already know) of course not all that smart. Fortunately I live in an age where I can get away with it. I followed the install directions and that left my plugin stuff installed into /usr/local but by default KDEDIRS (at least on my system) just has /usr. My initial gut reaction would be to modify it in ~/.bash_profile but I googled it and this was not the right answer. The right answer was easy though. I created ~/.kde/env and in there put a script that set KDEDIRS to include /usr/local and all was well. Though this is why I really look forward to this plugin getting to the repos because then I don't need to worry about this stuff any more. I just fire up apper, search by title on "kdevelop" and clicky-clicky she is installed. Or if I feel like being 1337 I su to root and type yum install kdevelop-python You know what I mean?

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