Sandals and Socks

I’ve looked at wxDesigner, DialogBlocks, wxGlade, and Boa Contructor’s Designer (I’m probably forgetting one or two). I’ve use the latter two quite a bit. wxGlade is the better free one as it is stand-alone and can generate code in several languages including XRC, and is easy to use, though until version 0.5 came along it was not very stable.

DialogBlocks is an excellent GUI builder but it doesn’t support Python, only C++ and XRC. Since XRC only describes only subset of a GUI’s aspects (namely, containement/widget/sizer hierarchy and callbacks), this means that a lot of the GUI-related features such as data transfer and validation are not available to Python from DialogBlocks. If DialoBlocks supported python I would be for it without hesitation.

That said, all those GUI editors seem to approach GUI building the wrong way. When I build a GUI, I want to be able to see the effect of my changes immediately, and not have to “run” or “test” the GUI definition. And there is no reason why that can’t happen for a lot of the GUI components in wxPython, since the containers support adding and removing and reparenting controls on the fly. Moreover, I haven’t found one GUI editor that makes it easy to integrate containers or controls that are not in the core, e.g. the wxFlatNotebook. This should also be straightforward in wxPython as long as the editor gives the programmer some freedom to define constructor arguments and methods to use to set sizers or add controls.

Add this to the list of projects I would like to work on.

Have been looking for good python development environment for a long time. Have tried many of them: Boa, SPE, PythonWin, IDLE, SciTe, PyScripter, WingIDE, notepad++. They all provide some powerful features, some not so powerful, but each is missing some important stuff, often found in the others.

Really what I’m looking for in a good Dev Env (not necessarily IDE in the usual sense of fully integrating a debugger etc) is quite simple:

• Good editing capabilities, bu no more:
  • syntax highlighting
  • smart indent
  • indent/dedent block of code
  • match brackets
  • move/copy blocks of code
  • code completion and call tips
  • find where a symbol is defined
  • find where a symbol is used
  • find in files, find in all open, find local
  • replace in files, etc; all the find/replace results have to be non-modal, repeatable easily
  • rejustify a comment paragraph
  • code folding, un/fold all, un/fold level in local
  • refactor a piece of code into a function
  • easy to remember keyboard shortcuts
  • make some lines into a comment (using only begin/end comment)
  • convert tabs to spaces
• Browsing:
  • Find a module by name (open in editor)
  • Browse a folder (open selected in editor)
  • Find module where a symbol is defined
• Good testing capabilities:
  • run the file, run with args, pause in console window when done
  • run a file that uses the file being edited; remember that file
  • click in console on traceback line and go to that file/line
  • ability to define one or more scripts to run for testing (e.g. nosetests, pychecker, etc) and keyboard shortcuts or menu items for them, and see output in a window
  • ability to go to file/line of a traceback selection (for cases where console output not possible, e.g. when testing web app)
• Support documentation:
  • ability to specify a script to run to generate documentation from the file; a few defaults could be in the basic app, e.g. pydoc, epydoc, doctest etc
  • view generated documentation in a window associated to file
  • view diagram of modules imported and of public interface

Editors found useful so far:

• Notepad++: great general purpose editor, simpler and more consistent than SciTe; however the plugin system causes new functionality to be difficult to find since new menu items are not segrated into separate menu rather than going into the File, Search, View etc items. Also ALL plugins are added to menu, which is a bit overwhelming since I can never remember exactly where I saw a function (e.g. “insert line numbers”, was it in TextFX->Tools, TextFX->Edit, or Plugins->something?). Also, not an IDE: lacks a Python shell, difficult to run a script, etc.
• UliPad: very nice, seems more stable than SPE, integrates shells, introspection, debugger.
• BOA: UI clunky (one menu has so many items that it doesn’t fit on my screen!). Requires a “project” file but this has advantage that you can edit a file in your python application and BOA knows what file to run to start the application.
• SPE: nice polished UI but has some annoying bugs (like search stops working after a few edits and will say a pattern not found eventhough it is there!)

UliPad, BOA and SPE are all similar in that they combine an editor with syntax highlighting, code folding etc, together with other development tools such as external debugger, regexp editor, checkers (e.g. pylint).

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