Relationship between Eclipse, Aptana, PyDev, and LiClipse

Question

I've been going nowhere but in circles trying to understand the odd relationships between and varying levels of "standalone-ness" of these tools.

I've been using Aptana Studio on OSX for about 4 years and been happy with it, however my recent update to 3.6 blew up so many things I ended up rolling back to 3.4 just so I could work.

For better or worse, I do like Aptana, but I'm not bound to it and am now very frustrated with the latest version, specifically that all the python stuff went haywire. Searching for help is painful, as threads and advice are many years old.

So, in way of questions:

• can anyone explain the relationship between Eclipse, Aptana, PyDev, and LiClipse? And more importantly:
• a recommendation that meets the following criteria

What I need/want is:

• something free and open source
• with a current and active community
• easily themeable with dark colors so I'm not staring at the sun 8 hours a day
• tight python features (pep, pylint, ability to jump to references with a keypress, etc)
• tight html/css/javascript features

Like I said, I do like Aptana, just frustrated in the apparent lack of a current community and how it seems to be falling apart.

Answer 1

Well, I'm not sure this is a good question for stackoverflow... anyways, I'll try to explain how it goes:

Aptana Studio 3 is an IDE which is currently supported by Appcelerator. Their main focus is currently on supporting the Appcelerator mobile platform (actually that's Titanium Studio, but Aptana Studio 3 is the basis for it -- the languages they aim for are html/css/javascript, which is what's needed for Titanium)... Although they do integrate a pretty old version of PyDev too (as PyDev requires a newer java whereas they're still on an older version of Java, so, I guess it's currently hard for them to keep it up to date).

Back in the day, they supported the development of PyDev, but decided to stop that support some time ago -- there's a bit more history at: http://pydev.blogspot.com.br/2013/03/keeping-pydev-alive-through-crowdfunding.html.

After that, LiClipse (http://www.liclipse.com/) was created out of my frustration to support dark themes and have support for more languages (it was a crowdfunded project -- it should've been an open source project, but didn't reach its goals for that, so, in the end it's closed source, and its revenue is a part of what keeps the PyDev development going on).

And at last, Eclipse is the basis for both platforms -- so, external plugins should integrate nicely into any of those.

Now, on the recommendation front:

• LiClipse should meet your dark/python/html/css/javascript issues (its focus on the editors front is on being dark-themed/lightweight and easy to add support for new languages), but it's not completely open source (some parts of it have been made open source though: http://www.liclipse.com/text).

• Aptana Studio 3 should still work and give support for the dark/python/html/css/javascript too, but given that they have to convert some things from the PyDev Java to its own version, Python support is always a bit outdated (as for the current community/support, I can't really comment, but I guess you should be able to report problems to them to try to solve the issues you have).

• And the other choice (which may be a bit more work to configure) would be using a bare Eclipse and installing PyDev and separate plugins for html/css/javascript (it seems there are multiple available, but I can't really comment on any of those).