Has anyone tried NetBeans 6.5 Python IDE?

Question

Has anyone tried the NetBeans 6.5 Python IDE?

What are your opinions? Is it better/worse than PyDev? Do you like it? How does it integrate with source control tools (especially Mercurial)?

Answer 1

I will share some of the feelings from using it for quite a while now. Things that are roughly the same quality as in Eclipse+Pydev+mercurial:

1. editor, code-completion
2. debugger features

Things that are better:

1. autoimport
2. color schemes (Norway today rocks)
3. Mercurial support (though it is getting better and better in Eclipse)

Things that are worse:

1. zipped egg packages are not recognized for either code completion or the autoimport
2. libdyn packages (e.g. datetime) are not recognized
3. debugger is having trouble with multiprocessing package
4. you cannot choose file from outside of the project (/usr/bin/paster) to be the main file (this is what I use to debug Pylons applications)

Does anyone have something to add to the list?

Answer 2

BraveSirFoobar, it would be nice to know more about what problems you found -- the very, very slow part, as well as the crash. The first time you run the IDE it will index information about your Python platform and project and libraries - such that it can do quick code completion, go to declaration etc. later - but once that's done it's not supposed to be slow - but there might be bugs.

Mercurial should definitely be supported well, since the NetBeans project itself (and Solaris and Java) are all hosted in Mercurial repositories.

We plan to have really deep support for Python, much in the style of our Ruby support. One of the things which really helped in our Ruby work was the feedback from our early adopters, so if you try Python and have issues with it, please let us know so we can fix it. (Feedback links here: http://wiki.netbeans.org/Python )

-- Tor

Answer 3

Compared to pydev, I found it very, very slow, and it crashed (once) when I created a project from existing sources. It's still beta, though.

Integration with SCMs will be as good as netbeans is already (I only tried subversion, which worked fine).

Feature-wise it was about the same : refactor, debugging, code assist... I'll stick with pydev for the moment, which is IMHO a great tool.

Answer 4

Sun use Mercurial internally now, so expect that their IDE support for it will be top notch.