Cleanest way to run/debug python programs in windows

Question

Python for Windows by default comes with IDLE, which is the barest-bones IDE I\'ve ever encountered. For editing files, I\'ll stick to emacs, thank you very much.

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Answer 1

I use eclipse with pydev. Eclipse can be sluggish, but I've become attached to integrated svn/cvs, block indent/unindent and run as unittest features. (Also has F5 run)

If your comfortable in emacs though I don't see any reason to make such a major change.

I suggest instead that you replace your 'crappy command prompt' with powershell. It's not as crappy.

(As mentioned by Soviut and The Dark - you can increase the buffer width/window size to more than 80 by title-bar>right-click>Properties>Buffer Width/Window Size edit even in crappy cmd)

Answer 2

Year 2017-2019 Answer:

Try Visual Studio Code, it has great support for Python debugging, auto completion and more!

See this link for details: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python#_debugging

Answer 3

For an interactive interpreter, nothing beats IPython. It's superb. It's also free and open source. On Windows, you'll want to install the readline library. Instructions for that are on the IPython installation documentation.

Winpdb is my Python debugger of choice. It's free, open source, and cross platform (using wxWidgets for the GUI). I wrote a tutorial on how to use Winpdb to help get people started on using graphical debuggers.

Answer 4

You can easily widen the Windows console by doing the following:

• click the icon for the console window in the upper right
• select Properties from the menu
• click the Layout tab
• change the Window Size > Width to 140

This can also be saved universally by changing the Defaults on the menu.

Answer 5

I edit my Python programs in EditPlus. I've configured a user tool that allows me to run my program and have its output appear in a frame below my editor window. My configuration will even let you double click on an exception lines in the output to jump directly to the file and line where the error occurred. You can grab the user tool configuration I use from here on the EditPlus wiki.

Perhaps there is similar functionality you can configure that allows you to run your program and display its output in your Emacs editor!?

Answer 6

If you ever graduate to vim, you can just run the following command to start the program you're currently editing in an interactive shell:

:!python -i my_script.py