9 ms·

Python Tools for Visual Studio

185 points by johndcook 15y ago

joeyespo 15y ago
This is fantastic. Been using it for a few weeks now. Coming from a bare bones editor (Crimson Editor :), it's been a wonderful experience.
rbanffy 15y ago
How many people here use Python on Windows? What are you using it for?
- megamark16 15y ago
  One of my coworkers had a whole setup script for getting an entire python development environment setup on Windows using Cygwin, including pip, virtualenv, mysql, gcc, ang cyg-get (like apt-get for Cygwin). All of the rest of us in the office use Macs or Linux (me), but he was able to checkout our projects from git, pip install the requirements files, and work just like the rest of us on his Windows machine. It required a lot of a figuring stuff out, but he kept great notes and can now go from a new install to a full environment by just following his notes.
- beaumartinez 15y ago
  I used to hack in Python on Windows, solely because that was the machine I had at hand.
- pointyhat 15y ago
  I do, although it's slowly being replaced with PowerShell (which is more convenient for integrating with windows applications, has better pipe semantics and better management stuff, particularly WMI, deployment etc). Plus it's built in and comes with a nice IDE on Win7 (PowerShell ISE). At the moment though, I use Python for time management (using some scripts I wrote), a general purpose calculator, data munging on the fly, watching memcache stats, reporting and some other general bits of duct tape and string.
  - zcrar70 15y ago
    I really struggle with PowerShell - so many things don't work like I expect them to (e.g. passing arguments to the command line, which is surprisingly hard given that's one of the problems it was meant to solve; anything involving operators - these are different from any other language; different error condition semantics for the different built-in commands; default error handling behaviour; etc.) Having the power of .Net in a scripting language is great, but it would have been even nicer if that language was consistent with the others on the platform (C#, JS, Ruby, Python for instance.) In fact I regularly think of converting our existing PS deployment scripts to Python, and better tooling support would definitely help.
    - brunomlopes 15y ago
      I used to struggle with it too, until some time ago I think it all kind of clicked in place. Don't try and think of it as similar to other shells like bash, but as an interactive console for objects. The operators, flow mechanisms and semantics make a lot of sense from that perspective, at least to me. I've found that in that capacity, and as soon as I grokked the object pipeline, it's a wonderful tool with access to the entire .net ecosystem and a really hard push from Microsoft to have support for it on most of their tools I've been automating several procedures with it and it's been working great. That said, I also have some (iron)python scripts for some other tasks that don't involve as much glue between applications and services.
    - pointyhat 15y ago
      Agree it's fugly but it's so powerful.
- mkr-hn 15y ago
  Go at it from the other direction: How many people here would use Python on Windows if there were better/more Python tools for Windows?
  - dagw 15y ago
    Out of curiosity what additional tools to you want. I use Python on Windows and haven't found anything of note missing.
    - pointyhat 15y ago
      Quick one from my POV: IDLE is slow as molasses and crashes if you do anything silly. Needs performance and isolation.
      - dagw 15y ago
        IDLE kind of sucks, but ever since I discovered DreamPie and iPython I don't think I've used IDLE even once.
      - zura 15y ago
        Not sure if anyone using or treating IDLE for serious development here, but PyScripter is a quite powerful IDE for Windows.
    - St-Clock 15y ago
      > what additional tools to you want A real POSIX shell that isn't slow. A fast gcc and the like. It is a pain to compile psycopg2 and lxml on windows compared to linux. Cygwin and virtual machines are unfortunately too slow when you are used to working in a non-virtualized Linux environment. I'm heavily biased though because once you are addicted to the command line, it becomes very hard to live on Windows :-(
      - bugsbunnyak 15y ago
        IPython doesn't get you POSIX, but it mitigates a lot of the pain. I run it inside console2 and the experience is pretty good. I have grep, gzip, plink, ffmpeg, and a bunch of other command line programs available from gnuwin32 and elsewhere. Given the choice I would use linux, but the most powerful machine I have access to is Win7 and I'm prohibited from changing this :(
- dagw 15y ago
  I am. Developing 3D visualization applications. Mainly a desktop application using wxPython, but also a collection of web app front ends to those visualizations using cherrypy.
  - rufugee 15y ago
    Is it for commercial use? How do you plan to protect IP?
    - dagw 15y ago
      Is it for commercial use? Yes How do you plan to protect IP? Mainly by asking nicely. We do use py2exe to package up our application, but that is more for convenience and to act as an indicator that we don't want people to go hacking around in the source code. Also, even though python makes up the bulk of the app, measured in lines of code, that is not where the really interesting things happen, so we're not too bothered one way or the other.
- mynegation 15y ago
  Financial engineering. Visualizations. Data conversion scripts. Various throwaway scripts. Different small scripts for personal tasks.
- jroll 15y ago
  I do. We use python in our lab for simple scripts (backups and doing things our test SW isn't capable of, like HTTP comm), aggregating data, and some small web tools. I'm at one of the big three, where getting a *nix machine on the network is next to impossible without piles of paperwork, and Windows is a requirement for our test machines. I'm all for better Windows tools :)
- rch 15y ago
  We are looking at it to build lightweight services on top of an unseemly pile of oracle, as part of a medical records system. It is already used heavily on the analysis side, but windows isn't required there.
- deleo 15y ago
  I use Python on Windows for Django developement. Since I'm need to use other Win based software for work I use it also as my dev station. Can't complain, Windows does the job and Python doesn't care. One of the advantages of Python being x-platform. I find that most people that use Linux for dev, then emulate Windows for something, so I just stick to Win. This might change in Oct when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out, but probably now. Win has served me always very well.
- briancurtin 15y ago
  We develop trading software exclusively on Windows, and I use it for internal tools and our testing infrastructure. There are a few C extensions written to wrap our libraries, a lot of integration, regression, performance, and load libraries, and a bunch of dev tools to setup environments with our dependencies and such. I introduced Python to the company in 2006 after writing a few very quick and dead simple test tools, and it seemed to pick up steam once our QA organization was looking for a way to beef up automation efforts.
- WalterGR 15y ago
  How many people here use Python on Windows? What are you using it for? I used it for Python's excellent NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit - http://www.nltk.org/ http://www.nltk.org/) to build http://www.offensivest.com/books/ http://www.offensivest.com/books/ . That site ranks the most vulgar English works released by Project Gutenberg. I calculated the ranking based on ~150k user ratings of the offensiveness of words listed on The Online Slang Dictionary.
- skrebbel 15y ago
  You're asking that like it's special. Why is that? I mean, Python works great on Windows. Has an installer and all that; next next next finish. Package management is something of a hell (esp if you're used to ruby gems) but all in all it works fine. I for one, prefer win as a dev platform, no matter the deployment platform. That means if the language of choice is Python, I use Python on Windows. I always assumed that this is rather common..
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Most of the pythonistas I know are more or less evenly divided between Mac and various flavors of Unix. Windows users are somewhat rare, but present. I was curious if other groups have different profiles.
    - dagw 15y ago
      "Pythonistas" might not use windows, but a lot of programmers who work on Windows use python. Python on windows has been actively used at every place I've ever worked.
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        Why would pythonistas not use Windows? I know I don't, but not everyone agrees with me.
        RyanMcGreal 15y ago
        Why would any programmer who isn't actually programming for Windows use Windows? Unless you're writing .net applications in VS, Windows isn't a developer-friendly operating environment.
        rbanffy 15y ago
        Windows seems popular among programmers who also want to run PC games, even if they don't program for Windows.
- cafard 15y ago
  A variety of tasks. To mention just a few: moving data between spreadheets and a database, with edits along the way; bashing a vendor's files into a usable form; rewriting AutoCad interchange files (.dxf files) to include new labels based on existing ones; providing mass upload into a document library where the original developers gave us only file-at-a-time. In the *x world, I tend to use Perl, because I learned that first and know things in my fingers that I have to stop and think about with Python. In the Windows world, though Python for Windows just makes life so much easier.
- evilduck 15y ago
  tkinter. Python/tkinter is the fastest and easiest way I've found to create and distribute small[1] cross platform apps with GUIs. Python's batteries included philosophy makes it really great for cross platform uses, although it sometimes means constraining yourself to only the included batteries. Average users can easily manage installing Python since it requires no admin privileges, and it works out of the box without hassle (and it's already there for linux workstations). Once they have it installed you can just email *.pyw scripts and they work for Windows users automagically and email filters that block .exe attachments let them through. In the super restricted government computing environment I did this in (a mix of Windows and Linux computers), the only other reasonable option would have been the JVM, which wouldn't have been nearly as fast to develop against. [1] I'm talking super simple one-off tools that are written and distributed in an afternoon, not fully designed and developed products. Keep in mind, creating a button that simply runs a regex against a file and spits out a result is literally magic for most people, what I can do in 3 hours of effort can save a non-programmer hundreds of man-hours of work.
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  Internal web applications at work. It's more clunky and cumbersome to install packages on Windows than *nix and the command line is underpowered and less integrated, but the benefits (and sheer joy) of programming in Python are worth the slight impedance mismatch.
- natmaster 15y ago
  Not only do I use Python on Windows, I use python at my job at Microsoft.
- tjr 15y ago
  Avionics simulation software.
- runjake 15y ago
  Google App Engine, random stuff I write, and system scripting when PowerShell is annoying me. It works well on Windows.
- iamelgringo 15y ago
  If you go to PyCon, you'll see a _ton of Windows User, a ton of Mac users and a ton of Linux users. The Python community is impressively OS agnostic. The startup community less so. I dev on Win because of the better multiple monitor support. I run using 3 large monitors on my Dev box, that I can rotate between landscape and portrait mode at will. Python is my language of choice for WebDev, tools, etc...
- iamelgringo 15y ago
  If you go to PyCon, you'll see a _ton of Windows User, a ton of Mac users and a ton of Linux users. The Python community is impressively OS agnostic. The startup community less so. I dev on Win because of the better multiple monitor support. I run using 3 large monitors on my Dev box, that I can rotate between landscape and portrait mode at will. Python is my language of choice for WebDev, tools, etc...
- stoney 15y ago
  I use Python on Windows for various things, primarily number crunching. Mostly I use it as a better (for me) Matlab, but it's also handy for random scripting tasks. And why do I use Windows? Excel.
- pragmatic 15y ago
  Scripting. I also script Android and *nix with it. I see it as a universal shell. I'm also writing a cross platform program in it. It's support for Windows features is quite good. (no gui stuff so I can't speak to that). In the future I want to try pygame (or other gaming framework) if I can find the time.
- malkia 15y ago
  Lots of AutoDesk products are extended with Python, like Maya and MotionBuilder And in our studio, for good and bad, Windows is mostly deployed (audio guys might consider getting Macs again, as there was not proper support for ProTools on recent Windows versions)
tansey 15y ago
Pretty awesome that numpy and scipy are now supported by .NET. Does anyone know if the nltk is supported yet?
- runevault 15y ago
  Kinda makes me wonder how easy it'd be to use them with c# and other .net languages, for anyone who was coming over from Python and already comfortable with those libs.
silverbax88 15y ago
Awesome. Now I can do my robotics programming in the best IDE in existence. Sorry, Eclipse, I love you and we're great together, but you're no Visual Studio.
- blibble 15y ago
  and VS is no IDEA, which also has Python support!
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    You mean IntelliJIDEA, right? That intellisense is really nice, I loved it when I saw it VS too. Get a kick out of Java devs who think it's new. Sorry, not trying to bust on you, but I write in all these IDEs...I still love VS. But hey, C# is just a copy of Java, so maybe it evens out.
    - innes 15y ago
      I haven't used IntelliJIDEA, but I do use Jetbrains' Resharper, which transforms VS into a much better IDE. If that's anything to go by, IntelliJIDEA's intellisense will be better than VS's intellisense. Having said that, I just watched the screencast[1] of Python intellisense in VS, very impressive. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CoGsSlrxKk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CoGsSlrxKk
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    IDEA's Python support seems very poor compared to VS. I installed the IDEA Python plugin and when I typed "import " it said "no suggestions". Same thing when I typed "sys." and when I created a new Python project, it couldn't find any interpreters installed on my system. Meanwhile in VS, after installing the Python plugin all of that stuff just worked the first time.
    - rufugee 15y ago
      When you start up a new Pycharm project or add a new interpreter, you have to let the index processes run (there's an indicator in the lower toolbar which will tell you when background processes are running...click it). When those index processes are finished, Pycharm will definitely autocomplete import statements: http://imgur.com/JRsfH http://imgur.com/JRsfH
mhb 15y ago
Can I use it for remote debugging of an AWS server? Like Komodo IDE?
- mhb 15y ago
  Doesn't look like it: Our remote debugging solution depends on msvsmon to provide the attach-to-process functionality, so remote debugging doesn't work on linux out of the box. However, given a process attach infrastructure on linux you could reuse our debugger.py to talk back to Visual Studio, as that is a simple socket connection. If you wanted to implement that and contribute it back we'd definitely look at taking it. http://pytools.codeplex.com/discussions/259591 http://pytools.codeplex.com/discussions/259591
alok-g 15y ago
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938632 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938632
samyvilar 15y ago
Interesting, I guess this shows how popular python has become, tried a couple IDEs, so far pycharm, based on intellij, is one of the better ones if any one has a better one would love to try it ...
joeyespo 15y ago
The only complaint I have is that the installer hijacks the Python icons. I don't exactly care what program .py files open with since I usually drag/drop them into the appropriate editor and run Python apps from the command line. But I grew quite fond of CPython's file icons and they're much different after Python Tools installation. The workaround is to reinstall Python after installing Python Tools.

185 points by johndcook 15y ago

This is fantastic. Been using it for a few weeks now. Coming from a bare bones editor (Crimson Editor :), it's been a wonderful experience.

rbanffy 15y ago

How many people here use Python on Windows? What are you using it for?

megamark16 15y ago
One of my coworkers had a whole setup script for getting an entire python development environment setup on Windows using Cygwin, including pip, virtualenv, mysql, gcc, ang cyg-get (like apt-get for Cygwin). All of the rest of us in the office use Macs or Linux (me), but he was able to checkout our projects from git, pip install the requirements files, and work just like the rest of us on his Windows machine. It required a lot of a figuring stuff out, but he kept great notes and can now go from a new install to a full environment by just following his notes.
beaumartinez 15y ago
I used to hack in Python on Windows, solely because that was the machine I had at hand.
pointyhat 15y ago
I do, although it's slowly being replaced with PowerShell (which is more convenient for integrating with windows applications, has better pipe semantics and better management stuff, particularly WMI, deployment etc). Plus it's built in and comes with a nice IDE on Win7 (PowerShell ISE). At the moment though, I use Python for time management (using some scripts I wrote), a general purpose calculator, data munging on the fly, watching memcache stats, reporting and some other general bits of duct tape and string.
- zcrar70 15y ago
  I really struggle with PowerShell - so many things don't work like I expect them to (e.g. passing arguments to the command line, which is surprisingly hard given that's one of the problems it was meant to solve; anything involving operators - these are different from any other language; different error condition semantics for the different built-in commands; default error handling behaviour; etc.) Having the power of .Net in a scripting language is great, but it would have been even nicer if that language was consistent with the others on the platform (C#, JS, Ruby, Python for instance.) In fact I regularly think of converting our existing PS deployment scripts to Python, and better tooling support would definitely help.
  - brunomlopes 15y ago
    I used to struggle with it too, until some time ago I think it all kind of clicked in place. Don't try and think of it as similar to other shells like bash, but as an interactive console for objects. The operators, flow mechanisms and semantics make a lot of sense from that perspective, at least to me. I've found that in that capacity, and as soon as I grokked the object pipeline, it's a wonderful tool with access to the entire .net ecosystem and a really hard push from Microsoft to have support for it on most of their tools I've been automating several procedures with it and it's been working great. That said, I also have some (iron)python scripts for some other tasks that don't involve as much glue between applications and services.
  - pointyhat 15y ago
    Agree it's fugly but it's so powerful.
mkr-hn 15y ago
Go at it from the other direction: How many people here would use Python on Windows if there were better/more Python tools for Windows?
- dagw 15y ago
  Out of curiosity what additional tools to you want. I use Python on Windows and haven't found anything of note missing.
  - pointyhat 15y ago
    Quick one from my POV: IDLE is slow as molasses and crashes if you do anything silly. Needs performance and isolation.
    - dagw 15y ago
      IDLE kind of sucks, but ever since I discovered DreamPie and iPython I don't think I've used IDLE even once.
    - zura 15y ago
      Not sure if anyone using or treating IDLE for serious development here, but PyScripter is a quite powerful IDE for Windows.
  - St-Clock 15y ago
    > what additional tools to you want A real POSIX shell that isn't slow. A fast gcc and the like. It is a pain to compile psycopg2 and lxml on windows compared to linux. Cygwin and virtual machines are unfortunately too slow when you are used to working in a non-virtualized Linux environment. I'm heavily biased though because once you are addicted to the command line, it becomes very hard to live on Windows :-(
    - bugsbunnyak 15y ago
      IPython doesn't get you POSIX, but it mitigates a lot of the pain. I run it inside console2 and the experience is pretty good. I have grep, gzip, plink, ffmpeg, and a bunch of other command line programs available from gnuwin32 and elsewhere. Given the choice I would use linux, but the most powerful machine I have access to is Win7 and I'm prohibited from changing this :(
dagw 15y ago
I am. Developing 3D visualization applications. Mainly a desktop application using wxPython, but also a collection of web app front ends to those visualizations using cherrypy.
- rufugee 15y ago
  Is it for commercial use? How do you plan to protect IP?
  - dagw 15y ago
    Is it for commercial use? Yes How do you plan to protect IP? Mainly by asking nicely. We do use py2exe to package up our application, but that is more for convenience and to act as an indicator that we don't want people to go hacking around in the source code. Also, even though python makes up the bulk of the app, measured in lines of code, that is not where the really interesting things happen, so we're not too bothered one way or the other.
mynegation 15y ago
Financial engineering. Visualizations. Data conversion scripts. Various throwaway scripts. Different small scripts for personal tasks.
jroll 15y ago
I do. We use python in our lab for simple scripts (backups and doing things our test SW isn't capable of, like HTTP comm), aggregating data, and some small web tools. I'm at one of the big three, where getting a *nix machine on the network is next to impossible without piles of paperwork, and Windows is a requirement for our test machines. I'm all for better Windows tools :)
rch 15y ago
We are looking at it to build lightweight services on top of an unseemly pile of oracle, as part of a medical records system. It is already used heavily on the analysis side, but windows isn't required there.
deleo 15y ago
I use Python on Windows for Django developement. Since I'm need to use other Win based software for work I use it also as my dev station. Can't complain, Windows does the job and Python doesn't care. One of the advantages of Python being x-platform. I find that most people that use Linux for dev, then emulate Windows for something, so I just stick to Win. This might change in Oct when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out, but probably now. Win has served me always very well.
briancurtin 15y ago
We develop trading software exclusively on Windows, and I use it for internal tools and our testing infrastructure. There are a few C extensions written to wrap our libraries, a lot of integration, regression, performance, and load libraries, and a bunch of dev tools to setup environments with our dependencies and such. I introduced Python to the company in 2006 after writing a few very quick and dead simple test tools, and it seemed to pick up steam once our QA organization was looking for a way to beef up automation efforts.
WalterGR 15y ago
How many people here use Python on Windows? What are you using it for? I used it for Python's excellent NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit - http://www.nltk.org/ http://www.nltk.org/) to build http://www.offensivest.com/books/ http://www.offensivest.com/books/ . That site ranks the most vulgar English works released by Project Gutenberg. I calculated the ranking based on ~150k user ratings of the offensiveness of words listed on The Online Slang Dictionary.
skrebbel 15y ago
You're asking that like it's special. Why is that? I mean, Python works great on Windows. Has an installer and all that; next next next finish. Package management is something of a hell (esp if you're used to ruby gems) but all in all it works fine. I for one, prefer win as a dev platform, no matter the deployment platform. That means if the language of choice is Python, I use Python on Windows. I always assumed that this is rather common..
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Most of the pythonistas I know are more or less evenly divided between Mac and various flavors of Unix. Windows users are somewhat rare, but present. I was curious if other groups have different profiles.
  - dagw 15y ago
    "Pythonistas" might not use windows, but a lot of programmers who work on Windows use python. Python on windows has been actively used at every place I've ever worked.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      Why would pythonistas not use Windows? I know I don't, but not everyone agrees with me.
      - RyanMcGreal 15y ago
        Why would any programmer who isn't actually programming for Windows use Windows? Unless you're writing .net applications in VS, Windows isn't a developer-friendly operating environment.
        rbanffy 15y ago
        Windows seems popular among programmers who also want to run PC games, even if they don't program for Windows.
cafard 15y ago
A variety of tasks. To mention just a few: moving data between spreadheets and a database, with edits along the way; bashing a vendor's files into a usable form; rewriting AutoCad interchange files (.dxf files) to include new labels based on existing ones; providing mass upload into a document library where the original developers gave us only file-at-a-time. In the *x world, I tend to use Perl, because I learned that first and know things in my fingers that I have to stop and think about with Python. In the Windows world, though Python for Windows just makes life so much easier.
evilduck 15y ago
tkinter. Python/tkinter is the fastest and easiest way I've found to create and distribute small[1] cross platform apps with GUIs. Python's batteries included philosophy makes it really great for cross platform uses, although it sometimes means constraining yourself to only the included batteries. Average users can easily manage installing Python since it requires no admin privileges, and it works out of the box without hassle (and it's already there for linux workstations). Once they have it installed you can just email *.pyw scripts and they work for Windows users automagically and email filters that block .exe attachments let them through. In the super restricted government computing environment I did this in (a mix of Windows and Linux computers), the only other reasonable option would have been the JVM, which wouldn't have been nearly as fast to develop against. [1] I'm talking super simple one-off tools that are written and distributed in an afternoon, not fully designed and developed products. Keep in mind, creating a button that simply runs a regex against a file and spits out a result is literally magic for most people, what I can do in 3 hours of effort can save a non-programmer hundreds of man-hours of work.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
Internal web applications at work. It's more clunky and cumbersome to install packages on Windows than *nix and the command line is underpowered and less integrated, but the benefits (and sheer joy) of programming in Python are worth the slight impedance mismatch.
natmaster 15y ago
Not only do I use Python on Windows, I use python at my job at Microsoft.
tjr 15y ago
Avionics simulation software.
runjake 15y ago
Google App Engine, random stuff I write, and system scripting when PowerShell is annoying me. It works well on Windows.
iamelgringo 15y ago
If you go to PyCon, you'll see a _ton of Windows User, a ton of Mac users and a ton of Linux users. The Python community is impressively OS agnostic. The startup community less so. I dev on Win because of the better multiple monitor support. I run using 3 large monitors on my Dev box, that I can rotate between landscape and portrait mode at will. Python is my language of choice for WebDev, tools, etc...
iamelgringo 15y ago
If you go to PyCon, you'll see a _ton of Windows User, a ton of Mac users and a ton of Linux users. The Python community is impressively OS agnostic. The startup community less so. I dev on Win because of the better multiple monitor support. I run using 3 large monitors on my Dev box, that I can rotate between landscape and portrait mode at will. Python is my language of choice for WebDev, tools, etc...
stoney 15y ago
I use Python on Windows for various things, primarily number crunching. Mostly I use it as a better (for me) Matlab, but it's also handy for random scripting tasks. And why do I use Windows? Excel.
pragmatic 15y ago
Scripting. I also script Android and *nix with it. I see it as a universal shell. I'm also writing a cross platform program in it. It's support for Windows features is quite good. (no gui stuff so I can't speak to that). In the future I want to try pygame (or other gaming framework) if I can find the time.
malkia 15y ago
Lots of AutoDesk products are extended with Python, like Maya and MotionBuilder And in our studio, for good and bad, Windows is mostly deployed (audio guys might consider getting Macs again, as there was not proper support for ProTools on recent Windows versions)

tansey 15y ago

Pretty awesome that numpy and scipy are now supported by .NET. Does anyone know if the nltk is supported yet?

runevault 15y ago
Kinda makes me wonder how easy it'd be to use them with c# and other .net languages, for anyone who was coming over from Python and already comfortable with those libs.

silverbax88 15y ago

Awesome. Now I can do my robotics programming in the best IDE in existence. Sorry, Eclipse, I love you and we're great together, but you're no Visual Studio.

blibble 15y ago
and VS is no IDEA, which also has Python support!
- silverbax88 15y ago
  You mean IntelliJIDEA, right? That intellisense is really nice, I loved it when I saw it VS too. Get a kick out of Java devs who think it's new. Sorry, not trying to bust on you, but I write in all these IDEs...I still love VS. But hey, C# is just a copy of Java, so maybe it evens out.
  - innes 15y ago
    I haven't used IntelliJIDEA, but I do use Jetbrains' Resharper, which transforms VS into a much better IDE. If that's anything to go by, IntelliJIDEA's intellisense will be better than VS's intellisense. Having said that, I just watched the screencast[1] of Python intellisense in VS, very impressive. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CoGsSlrxKk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CoGsSlrxKk
- WayneDB 15y ago
  IDEA's Python support seems very poor compared to VS. I installed the IDEA Python plugin and when I typed "import " it said "no suggestions". Same thing when I typed "sys." and when I created a new Python project, it couldn't find any interpreters installed on my system. Meanwhile in VS, after installing the Python plugin all of that stuff just worked the first time.
  - rufugee 15y ago
    When you start up a new Pycharm project or add a new interpreter, you have to let the index processes run (there's an indicator in the lower toolbar which will tell you when background processes are running...click it). When those index processes are finished, Pycharm will definitely autocomplete import statements: http://imgur.com/JRsfH http://imgur.com/JRsfH

mhb 15y ago

Can I use it for remote debugging of an AWS server? Like Komodo IDE?

mhb 15y ago
Doesn't look like it: Our remote debugging solution depends on msvsmon to provide the attach-to-process functionality, so remote debugging doesn't work on linux out of the box. However, given a process attach infrastructure on linux you could reuse our debugger.py to talk back to Visual Studio, as that is a simple socket connection. If you wanted to implement that and contribute it back we'd definitely look at taking it. http://pytools.codeplex.com/discussions/259591 http://pytools.codeplex.com/discussions/259591

alok-g 15y ago

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938632 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938632

samyvilar 15y ago

Interesting, I guess this shows how popular python has become, tried a couple IDEs, so far pycharm, based on intellij, is one of the better ones if any one has a better one would love to try it ...

joeyespo 15y ago

The only complaint I have is that the installer hijacks the Python icons. I don't exactly care what program .py files open with since I usually drag/drop them into the appropriate editor and run Python apps from the command line. But I grew quite fond of CPython's file icons and they're much different after Python Tools installation. The workaround is to reinstall Python after installing Python Tools.