I have been a vim user for the last 6 years. I’ve tried emacs. I used UltraEdit when I was doing more on Windows. I’ve tried JEdit. I’ve even tried Eclipse before. But I decided to give it another spin. The last time I used Eclipse, I found it fat, slow, non-intuitive (and that coming from a vim user), and it didn’t seem to buy me anything I couldn’t already do in vim.

I’ve got PyDev and a Subversion plugin installed and I like it a lot better than I thought I would. Autoindenting seems to work reasonably well. It shows a nifty outline of my code, highlighting class and method definitions and imports. It has a folding mechanism which folds at the class and method level by default. I don’t know if that is configurable. It appears to have some autocompletion, but doesn’t seem to complete on imported modules. It also has built-in debugging support, which I haven’t tried yet.

Surprisingly, I don’t have anything negative to say about PyDev. Eclipse is a totally different experience for me, so that makes using it a little painful. I’ll have to keep fidding with it and see if I could make the switch. I would definitely miss the vim keybindings. I found a plugin once that had limited vi style keybindings, but it didn’t support some of the features of vim I use ever day.

What editor/IDE do you use to work with your Python modules?