Aaron Toponce

A house contractor utilizes the best tools of his trade. As does a plumber, carpenter, mechanic and technician. So should developers.

It is easy as a developer to get caught into using simple tools to get the job done. For example, when editing a web page, a simple text editor gets the job done just as good as any IDE. It might just take a little longer to accomplish the task. Sure, you don't have all of your project files at your fingertips. You don't have intelligent word completion. You don't have compiling and debugging tools. But, those can get in the way when you only need to edit a few lines of code. Why spend all the time bringing up the debugger, intelligent completion and project files, which could take a long time depending on the size of your project, when you can make your edit just as fast?

However, with that said, software development and programming just would not be where it is today had it not been for integrated deveopment environments (IDEs). IDEs make development as painless as possible. They provide run-time environments, compilers, debuggers, project information and much much more. IDEs just make coding pleasurable.

Okay. That's great and all, but what about Python? There are great IDEs for C/C++, Java, BASIC, and even for web aps. But is there really anything solid out there for Python? Don't you either have to create an executable script, or parse everything through the interpreter? For those of you who code in Python, know this isn't the case. Welcome Stani's Python Editor (SPE).

Just looking at SPE, without even getting into the code, it looks good. It is cross platform compatible (Linux, Mac, Windows), clean, loads quite fast and it's just plain sexy. Digging into the code, we find managing projects, a compiler and debugger, command line interpreter, intelligent word completion, project building, etc. Pretty much everything we established what makes a good IDE. And it's not even a first release! And, it's free. Free as in beer, free as in freedom. Free.

Sweet.