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Your Development Environment

Text Editors

VIM

There exist a couple of plugins and settings for the VIM editor to aid python development. If you only develop in Python, a good start is to set the default settings for indentation and linewrapping to values compliant with PEP8:

set textwidth=79
set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=4
set expandtab
set softtabstop=4
set shiftround

With these settings newlines are inserted after 79 characters and indentation is set to 4 spaces per tab. If you also use VIM for other languages, there is a handy plugin at indent, which handles indentation settings for python source files. Additionally there is also a handy syntax plugin at syntax featuring some improvements over the syntax file included in VIM 6.1.

These plugins supply you with a basic environment for developing in Python. However in order to improve the programming flow we also want to continually check for PEP8 compliance and check syntax. Luckily there exist PEP8 and Pyflakes to do this for you. If your VIM is compiled with +python you can also utilize some very handy plugins to do these checks from within the editor. For PEP8 checking install vim-pep8. Now you can map the vim function Pep8() to any hotkey or action you want. Similarly for pyflakes you can install vim-pyflakes. Now you can map Pyflakes() like the PEP8 function and have it called quickly. Both plugins will display errors in a quickfix list and provide an easy way to jump to the corresponding line. A very handy setting is calling these functions whenever a buffer is saved. In order to do this, enter the following lines into your vimrc:

autocmd BufWritePost *.py call Pyflakes()
autocmd BufWritePost *.py call Pep8()

.. todo:: add supertab notes

IDEs

PyCharm / IntelliJ IDEA

PyCharm is developed by JetBrains, also known for IntelliJ IDEA. Both share the same code base and most of PyCharm's features can be brought to IntelliJ with the free `Python Plug-In<http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=631/>`_..

Eclipse

The most popular Eclipse plugin for Python development is Aptana's PyDev.

Komodo IDE

Interpreter Tools

virtualenv

Virtualenv is a tool to keep the dependencies required by different projects in separate places, by creating virtual Python environments for them. It solves the "Project X depends on version 1.x but, Project Y needs 4.x" dilemma and keeps your global site-packages directory clean and manageable.

virtualenvwrapper

Virtualenvwrapper makes virtualenv a pleasure to use by wrapping the command line API with a nicer CLI.

pip install virtualenvwrapper

Put this into your ~/.bash_profile (Linux/Mac) file:

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_VIRTUALENV_ARGS='--no-site-packages'

This will prevent your virtualenvs from relying on your (global) site packages directory, so that they are completely separate..

Other Tools

IPython

$ pip install ipython

BPython

$ pip install bpython