PIDA as an IDE for Zope/Plone development

For the past several years, I've been using a bare-bones set of tools for my development work - usually nothing more than vim and a couple of terminal windows. Work has been picking up a bit, so I thought it might be worthwhile to scope out Python IDEs to see if any of them could streamline my workflow.

The most promising candidate was Wing IDE, which has excellent out-of-the-box support for Zope, but I prefer to stick with free/open-source tools. Next up was Eclipse with PyDev - but that didn't work out so well. There are many recipes for using Eclipse with Zope, but none of them allow you to take full advantage of the IDE, and if you want decent debugging, you've got to hand over some cash to get the extra PyDev bits to make it work.

While searching for the next candidate, I came across this excellent quote from Jean-Marc Orliaguet ...

"I have personally always used vi when developing with Zope2 and Zope3. I have tried different IDEs for python (Wing IDE, Eclipse pydev with extensions, BOA constructor) but always went back to vi, because I noticed that what I wanted was not really another editor but an integrated development environment and there is no such thing as half-integrated environment."

I could not have thought nor said that better myself - vi/vim is not the easiest editor to learn how to use proficiently, but once you do, it's a skill you don't want to let go of. You can get vi emulation with Eclipse and other IDEs, but they just don't feel like the real thing. I wanted an IDE that wrapped itself around a genuine vim, to give me quick access to IDE-ish things like version control, project organization, debugging and class browsing - without requiring me to sacrifice my hard-earned vim skills. What I wanted was... PIDA.

PIDA is a modular Python IDE framework, itself written in Python, that embeds your favorite editor (vim, emacs, and some others I believe) in a GUI and lets you mix and match other IDE features with a flexible plugin system. I've installed it, configured a few projects for my various Plone development projects, and I've using it happily for several days now, with no complaints. :)

If you'd like to see how I've set PIDA up for Zope development and debugging, I've put together a Zope+PIDA tutorial at plone.org - peruse and enjoy!