I’d heard that Eclipse + PyDev made for a pretty useful Python development environment, so I installed them on the iMac. Later, I added MercurialEclipse. Today, I tried to use them.
Shortly thereafter, I dragged the whole mess to the trash.
Eclipse is ridiculously overcomplicated. It has docked panes everywhere, and they all have their own tabs, menus, toolbars, etc., etc., etc. It’s packed with bizarre operating modes, but isn’t smart enough to figure out which one of them it should be using at any given moment – no, I have to tell it.
PyDev…I never did figure out what changed in Eclipse after I installed PyDev. The word ‘PyDev’ showed up in a few places where it hadn’t been before, the project wizard had a PyDev project, but where were all the Python-specific development & testing tools?
MercurialEclipse is…eccentric, and undocumented. The developers offer a link to some tutorials that turn out to have been written by a fella more interested in Git than Mercurial, so the MercurialEclipse tutorials are really Git tutorials.
If you edit one of your source files, then want to commit it, you have to switch Eclipse into Synchronization mode (or some such), then flail around with a view of your project that’s similar to the PyDev view, but different.
These tools use the existing machine configuration – the ~/.hgrc file, the Python path, etc. – except when they don’t, and you have to go through all the setup again. (I have the gloomy suspicion this would have to be done for each new project, too.)
Go away, Eclipse / PyDev / MercurialEclipse. Come back when you don’t suck.
