I've been trying to get a good 'flow' going with respect to developing plugins and for some reason everything just feels cumbersome... It's not Python, it's been my scripting language of choice for years in the Linux world - although I admit that 80% of what I would write would be written in VIM and be command line and systems oriented, very little 'GUI' stuff...
I'm having trouble finding a GUI that I'm comfortable with and also finding a system that feels smooth. My environment is Mac Mini running headless in a different part of the house. I open a shared folder on the mini, a screen sharing session to see the desktop should I need it, run the Indigo console on my workstation (13" MB Air most of the time) connected to the mini, and then a Python coding environment of some sort. I find myself constantly switching between them all while coding/deploying/testing/reverting/etc. I've tried running a trial version of Indigo on my workstation and that helps a little with switching around, but I have no devices on the trial copy so that approach has very limited value. I'm wondering if anyone else has run into anything similar and if so how did you overcome it?
As to an IDE - I've tried several but the ones that felt intuitive had lacking Python support. The ones with good Python support felt kludgy (at least to me). I should start by saying that I hate Eclipse. We use it at work for Java development and I simply can't stand it. I've tried several variants of it - Aptanna, Spring, Tibco, etc. and they're all basically the same to me - when using Eclipse I feel like I'm trying to herd cats. Eclipse has great support for Python (using PyDev) but I just don't mesh with it like I feel I should. I have Active State's Komodo IDE (the paid-for version) which is what I use most often , for me it's better than Eclipse, but I still don't know if it's ideal. I like Panic's Coda for other stuff, but it doesn't work well for Python. Likewise other text editors with syntax highlighting like BBEdit, Text Wrangler, Textmate are good at what they do, but they're missing code completion, run-time debugging and other features that true IDEs have. It would be sweet if XCode had proper Python support, but alas nothing after all these years... Sadly the tool that feels best is Microsoft's Visual Studio (iron Python), but I no longer have Windows machines in the house plus I would imagine it would be a true nightmare to develop an Indigo plugin on a Windows workstation (refer back to above comments about 'smooth flow'...)
Soooo, am I asking for too much? Should I just get over it and deal with Eclipse, or forget the notion of code completion and and go with a really good text editor with syntax highlighting? What do y'all use? If it's Eclipse, how do you have it setup and use it productively? Matt and Jay feel free to jump in as well!
Edit: I should add that last night I downloaded Jetbrains' PyCharm to try out but haven't used it yet. I love their IDEA ide but hate to pay more for an IDE than I paid for Indigo (again it shows how awesome Indigo is!)... PyCharm is less expensive, so I'm hopeful. Has anyone here used it?
Thanks is advance,
Terry