Been playing more with komodo, just exploring I haven't used it in anger (too many distractions, life getting in the way). I have been looking into setting up my Django project. Here is what I have been able to do so far:
- Create a project file containing all the python files: django itself, my application and the template files. Komodo is quite happy editing all types of files, even the html in the template files. I have yet to put the css and supporting graphic files into subversion but when I do I will be able to put the css file in the project as well: that's all source files for a web application, edited using the same tool, organised in one project.
- There is a nice 'Run' facillty to run command line programs from within komodo. It is just so easy to run a command and add it to the toolbox for your project so that the tool is there while working on the project. This means the commands to open an ssh tunnel to mysql, do a svn update on Django, check my own files into my subversion repository, clean up .pyc files etc are a double click away. While it is entirely possible to set this up in Vim, it's to fiddly to bother with. Komodo makes it so easy. Komodo personal has no support for source control but it is easy enough to set up commands for your subversion operations.
- You can add shortcuts to URLs to your project so while you are working on your web app you quickly see the appropriate page in your browser. Ok, you could put shortcuts in your browser but they would be there all the time, polluting your shortcut namespace, and you would have to explicity swap from your editor/IDE to the browser to get to the shortcuts. What I am trying to say is that what komodo is doing is not rocket science, is not impossible any other way (even in vim) it's just that it is done in a way that is very easy to set up.
There is just one thing that is annoying me about komodo. To run my django app I need to run the django-admin.py file. I have yet to find a way to tell komodo that I always want this file exected. By default it always executes the file in the current tab of the editor. In my case I will not be editing django-admin.py as it is part of django itself, but I have to have this file open in the editor and switch to it's tab before I can debug. I tried recording a macro to switch to django-admin.py and then run but this doesn't work. I tried defining a debug configuration but each file gets it's own set of debug configurations. It looks horribly like I have to set up debug configuration for every source file that is likely to be the current file when I want to debug.
Back to the good stuff, there is a useful mode for editing css files: you tell komodo which html file you want to see it with and komodo splits the screen to show a css editor and a web browser preview window. It is a very nice setup for working with css files apart from it not helping you to write your css.
So far I am finding it quite impressive.
Peter's Moblog
