Eric Python IDE

Eric is a free integrated development environment for the Python and Ruby programming languages. For some time Eric4 was the variant for Python 2 and eric5 was the one for Python 3 but since the introduction of eric6 both python variants have been supported by a single variant.

By design, it acts as a front end for several programs, for example the QScintilla editor widget, the python language interpreter, Rope for code refactoring, Python Profiler for code profiling. Any functionality that is not required does not have to be installed. It is written using the PyQt Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit. It is extensible via a plug-in mechanism. The eric plug-in repository provides various kinds of extensions and is accessible from within the IDE.

The main features are a project manager, an editor with syntax highlighting, debugging, profiling, running python code with support for command-line parameters, unit testing, user interface design, a console for program output and a task manager (self-updating TODO list).

Several allusions are made to the British comedy group Monty Python, which the Python programming language is named after. Eric alludes to Eric Idle, a member of the group, and IDLE (Python), the standard python IDE shipped with most distributions.

Debugger

Eric includes an integrated graphical debugger which supports both interactive probing while suspended and auto breaking on exceptions.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eric.

• List of integrated development environments for Python

References

• Reg. Charney, Programming Tools: Eric3, Linux Journal, August 31, 2004
• (German) Farid Hajji, Das Python-Praxisbuch: Der große Profi-Leitfaden für Programmierer, Pearson Education, 2008, ISBN 3-8273-2543-9, p. 1142
• Jonathan Ellis, A review of 6 Python IDEs, September 9, 2005

External links

• Official website
• Vimal (October 9, 2009), My experiences with Eric, a Python IDE