20090326 UPDATE: software described here do not include large project-management tools. There are a few commercial IDEs that thus fall outside the boundaries of SoniPy. We are currently evaluating some others, such as Eric. If you have experience with Wric or other open-source python IDE and would like to write a few words about it, we'd be happy to post them here, subject to basic editorialising, of course!

Interactive Development Environments (IDEs)

Suffice it to say, because SoniPy pulls code from various sources in various formats, recommend using an IDE rather than a full-blown SDK (Software Development Kit: see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_kit).

Macintosh IDEs

From version 2.4 on, Macintosh specific versions of PYTHON come with an Interated Development Environment( IDEs) called "IDLE" built in. It has

• a Python Shell window, which gives you access to the Python interactive mode,
• a File Editor, which lets you create, browse and edit new or existing Python code,
• a Path Browser for searching through the path of available module source files,
• a simple Class Browser for finding the methods of classes,
• a flexible search capability through its Find in Files dialog that lets you search through your files and/or the systems' files to find text fragments, and
• a Debug Control Panel which provides for the symbolic debugging of Python programs.

Look in the folder Applications/MacPython X.Y (where X.Y is the version of MacPython installed; MacPython 2.4, for example. The IDLE application icon is shown on the right.

Read an introduction to IDLE here: http://www.python.org/idle/doc/idle2.html

Other text editors: VIM

For simple, pretty text-editing, the old-faithful vi/vim has a colour-coded Python meta-keyword version, which can be downloaded from: http://www.vim.org/

vim has a very useful print function that means you can print colour-coded Python to PDF and HTML formats