Peter's Blog

Further to my search for a python debugger I gave Stani's Python Editor a try. Observations:

• ran windows installer but it didn't create start menu entrys. To get it to run I had to:
  • rename c:\python24\scripts\spe to c:\python24\scripts\spe.py
  • run spe.py
• it started up running extremelt slowly: mouse moved in 2 inch steps. Don't know what it was up to.
• opened a python file and it was happy, ran at full speed.
• tried making the pane at the bottom of the screen smaller and it didn't seem to resize the source window, ugly space was left around it.
• ran python source checker and nothing happened. Later on, when I ran the program, the results of the source check appeared.
• directory browser is rooted at c:/python24 and doesn't appear to let me look elsewhere.
• it doesn't have a debugger (to me the whole point).
• runs at full speed (unlike WingIDE).
• it does seem to have lots of features, not sure they are all useful to me.

Conclusion: interesting work in progress but I don't need an editor, I want a debugger. I'm not criticising it for not being a debugger, I read it was an IDE so I asssumed it had a debugger. They appear to be planning to add one, maybe I should come back later.

I found a very good intro to using Python's built in debugger here. If I list my essential debugging features as:

• stop on exception for introspection
• set breakpoint in source code

Then I can easily enough define VIM macros to do it.

stop on exception for introspection

• launch script via the python debugger

  python -m pdb myscript.py
  

set breakpoint in source code

• Add import pdb to start of file, add pdb.set_trace() where I want my breakpoint.

There is this but it doesn't work on windows.