While I don’t usually advertise, I love eclipse for all of its feature rich implementations of language specific IDE’s. Among those is Pydev, a complete first class IDE for Python.
Recently, Pydev just hit version 1.6.0 (Congratulations!) with the following new features and oddities:
Release 1.6.0 o Code-completion added to the debug console o Entries in the debug console are evaluated on a line-by-line basis (previously an empty line was needed) o Threads started with thread.start_new_thread are now properly traced in the debugger o Added method -- pydevd.set_pm_excepthook() -- which clients may use to debug uncaught exceptions o Printing exception when unable to connect in the debugger o Interactive console may be created using the eclipse vm (which may be used for experimenting with Eclipse) o Apply patch working (Fixed NPE when opening compare editor in a dialog) o Added compatibility to Aptana Studio 3 (Beta) -- release from July 12th
Among others, Pydev also integrates gracefully with Jython and IronPython (that’s right, it’s a competitor of visual studio), contains templates and tools for AppEngine and Django projects, inline unit testing, an interactive console with autocomplete, ability to refactor portions of your code, autoimport and dependency resolution (even for unimported modules), a nice set of embeded debugging tools, and of course, syntax coloring.