This is a very good blog-posting and i fully agree with it:
http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2011/11/29/the-things-i-hate-about-idle-that-i-wish-someone-would-fix/
Idle is really only useful to teach the first steps of python. As soon as leaving the interactive mode, i force students to use a different editor than idle, mostly geany.
Geany is not trouble-free. Here is some things that are not good with geany, but still better than using Idle:
- Starting python programs out of geany never worked out-of-the-box for me under the windows OS. While teaching, i always use Linux but some students use Windows at home so it’s not ideal.
- Geany is not written in Python.
- Geny has bad code-completion when compared with Idle.
Something like: import random as r r.
(waiting for a yellow drop-down list of commands of the random module)
never worked as good as it worked with idle.
On the other hands, Geany does most things right out of the box:
Line numbers, pretty code navigation panel, color chooser to get rgb codes, font size changing with mouse wheel, to name just a few.
Until i find a better solution i will stay with Geany. I wish it would be shipped together with python and run out-of-the box on every major OS.
Please Flattr this:
Horst JENS
Have a look at http://ninja-ide.org/