Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

The Python interpreter contains everything that is needed to execute a Python script or to test Python code by interacting with the Python interpreter. However, writing scripts requires a text editor. There are usually at least two simple text editors included on a Windows machine (Notepad and Wordpad) and they work in an emergency to edit a script or even write a whole script. Unfortunately, they are very simple and do not allow the user functionality that would make it easier to write multiple scripts or very long scripts.

To bridge the gap, a series of programs collectively known as Integrated Development Environments have been developed. IDEs exist for all programming languages, and include functions such as variable listing, code assist, and more, that make them ideal to craft programming scripts. We will review a few of them to assess their usefulness to write Python scripts. The three discussed as follows are all free and well-established...