Hi there everyone, I’d like to share with you some of my experience with Eclipse as a IDE for Django and virtualEnv.
First of all I already tried some other IDEs, like VIM, TextMate, PyCharm and Gedit(that I still used ’till now), but for many reasons I just preferred a simple Text Editor.
VIM
Why not?
Well, I’ve the power it has, and all that stuff, how it’s fast and etc…
But the point is that if you want to use this as a working tool, you’ll need to train in that(a lot) to make it right. And since I couldn’t expend the time necessary to learn every single shortcut(I still dream of doing this *-*) this one was out.
TextMate
Now it’s the time that all the macboys start shouting that I need to buy a mac since it’s the most perfect, awesome, incredible OS ever… And I can understand, but I left TextMate out as my main IDE for to reasons:
It doesn’t have the resource of ctrl + click to navigate in a function/attribute/class(I’ll explain this latter on).
And more important of all:
I’m prefer a PC scenario that I have a linux system(WORK) and a windows shitted system(GAMES), and no, mac still can’t play games… Sorry Mac, but you lake my sense of having fun gaming.
PyCharm
Ok, this one at first promised a lot, but I don’t know if I was the only one that have this problem, but this IDE took me some long time to run, and do all the stuff(even more than Eclipse!!).
But that was not the real deal, the problem was that when we where starting to get along the IDE simply stoped, telling me that I should by a license(it was only a Shareware edition).
And, for what I read I could even use it as a IDE if my project where a open source.
“Ok” I thought, but if by some reason I want to do a parallel project that is not Open Source, I’ll need to buy a license?!
“Hummm.. no thanks, I prefer to find another FREE tool”
And that was the end for PyCharm.
Gedit
After all that I just fall back for Gedit(a normal text editor in Ubuntu) and a terminal… But some days ago I thought of given Eclipse(PyDev) a try.
And so this is what I got from Eclipse:
Eclipse(PyDev)
First I’m using the PyDev plugin for eclipse, in a Classig Eclipse installation.
Pros
And right at the start there are already plenty of good reasons to use this IDE:
- Code Completion(Including code for your project!)
- Debug(Nice one within Eclipse)
- Code Navigation(Ctrl + click in a function/class/method will that you to that code in a blink, and then you can go back using another shortcut)
Cons
Ok, not everything is a “sea of flowers”, there are some problems in there, the first one is how it deals with VirtualEnv:
- You need to configure what’s the python interpreter for that WORKSPACE, so if you want to have a separated python interpreter for each project you’ll need to set a different workspace for each project.
- Another problem is that if you have some more complex things in your project (like a different directory organization) will probably have problem with eclipse telling you that your project is full of errors).
Solutions
- For the errors that will pop in your face if your project is not in the normal django structure, you can just set the Eclipse option to stop checking errors(for eclipse there will be still erros, but for the most tools there will be no problems).
- For the PYTHON_PATH thing, I got a great help from Brian Jinwright That said that:
“You don’t have to create a new Workspace for each project/virtualenv. If you go to the Project menu and select Properties, then choose PyDev – Interperter/Grammar, then choose Click here to choose an interperter not listed then choose the virtualenv interperter that you want.”
That’s all, hope you enjoy.
There are two things that stuck out in your post that aren’t true and one thing that I think you should try out to make your experience with Eclipse better.
You need to configure what’s the python interpreter for that WORKSPACE, so if you want to have a separated python interpreter for each project you’ll need to set a different workspace for each project.
Another problem is that if you have some more complex things in your project (like a different directory organization) will probably have problem with eclipse telling you that your project is full of errors).
You don’t have to create a new Workspace for each project/virtualenv. If you go to the Project menu and select Properties, then choose PyDev – Interperter/Grammar, then choose Click here to choose an interperter not listed then choose the virtualenv interperter that you want. That’s it. I believe that will solve most that problem for number one.
I’m assuming (I could be wrong) that your second problem is associated with where your manage.py file is when creating the Django type project. If PyDev doesn’t find it in the normal place it will give you the option to select it.
Just some advice, switch to the JS version of Eclipse. It is still one of the official versions but it is easier to install stuff like the Git or Mercurial plugins..
Thanks Brian!
I really didn’t see that workaround about the workspace whing(that was really annoying)
But for the second problem, I wasn’t talking about a problem in the manage.py.
The thing is that if you have anything that is dynamically set in the sys.path for example, that won’t be appearing in Eclipse, and won’t be very pleasant to fix by adding manually every thing.
But as I said, this ones won’t block you when running the server or anything that’s done in run time, but in production the mapping for this modules will be blind.
But anyway I’ll edit the post, thanks for the reply!