[ckan-dev] Preferred IDE for CKAN development?

Thu Nov 1 11:08:52 UTC 2012

> If it helps, most of CKAN developers (all?) use vim for developing,

Surely there must be someone who does not use vim! Let us single them
out :) All those nice modern Python IDEs out there and everyone uses
this thing for the 70s designed for saving costly key presses when
working on remote servers at 5600 baud.

I use a combination of vim with various plugins and a tabbed terminal
with various command-line tools, rather than an all-in-one IDE. Some of
the vim plugins I use for python dev:

ctrl-p
syntastic (probably the most useful thing)
vim's filetype plugin so it does proper auto indenting and tabbing for Python

and in the terminal:

ipython
ipdb or updb, and the ipdb or updb plugin for nose
ack
virtualenv-wrapper
zsh with oh-my-zsh, if configured right you can get syntax highlighting
 of shell commands as you type them, good history substring search (the
 most useful thing) and tab-complete of things like git and pip options
 and subcommands with drop-down lists of suggestions

I can't think of anything else that's particularly important. I guess
there's not a lot to it really.

I don't defend vim really, it's hard to learn and ridiculously archaic,
and a lot of what it does seems to be very clever and complicated ways
to save on key presses when editing text, if you have the time to learn
a whole language of keyboard shortcuts, which does not seem as important
as actually helping you think about your code, but it is addictive once
you're in it's hard to get out.