My dev environment

A while back, I made a big commotion about migrating my dev environment from Eclipse with PyDev to Visual Studio 2012 with PVTS. That did not last as long as I intended.

While there is nothing wrong with the setup, my scripts simply aren’t big enough or interwoven enough to warrant a gigantic IDE. Also, my complete failure in getting Git to play nice with it has led me to fully switch over to Notepad++.

I initially installed it to be able to quickly edit ArcGIS for Windows Mobile .amp files. I also used it when I was dabbling with HTML5. I then started noticing how convenient it was to open up my Python scripts in there, and how I could open a new file, scribble some pseudocode before leaving work, and having it persist between sessions.

I was hooked. I set it up with two views so I could view files side by side, played with a few themes before settling on Navajo, and  I was off.

Three problems though: I could not, for the life of me, run Python scripts from the editor. It was incredibly frustrating to have to do my edits, then open the file in Idle to run. Secondly, no arcpy intellisense (sad). Lastly, it does not recognise the .pyt extension of ArcGIS Python toolboxes.

Which is why I am now creating all my Python toolboxes and other scripts in PyScripter. I tweaked it to recognise .pyt files using Joel McCune’s technique, so now I can get some arcpy intellisense in my .pyt files now. I still miss my Notepad++ though, so I still find myself writing one-off scripts there, while leaving my bigger projects in PyScripter.