Article submitted by Javier Derderian. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

PIDA is an IDE (integrated development environment) written in Python and the pygtk graphical toolkit. It is slightly different from other IDEs: rather than attempting to write a set of development tools of its own, PIDA reuses available tools. In this regards PIDA can be used as a framework for putting together your own customized IDE.

Although still a young application, PIDA already boasts a huge number of features because of the power of some of the tools it integrates. For example features such as code completion and syntax highlighting are well implemented in PIDA’s integrated editors far better than any editor built for a commercial IDE. PIDA currently features many code editing helpers: syntax highlighting, code completion, automatic indenting, block commenting, etc; project management, version control management, Python debugger and profiler, GTK+ GUI building and rapid application design.

Among the already integrated components you can find:

VIM and Emacs as embedded editors with full support of each one’s features: Syntax Higlighting Code completion Plugins

Bazaar, Git, Subversion (and more) as version control systems.

It’s actually designed to program in any language, but it has some Python specific features like a Python shell. You can program you own plugins, and there’s a very nice API documentation to help you go trought the plugin development path.

Some already available plugins are:

Pastebin Send code to a pastebin service PdfTex preview PdfTex preview compiles and displays pdf documents every time the buffer is saved. Python Show class/function from python file, and show compilation errors Python Debugger Python Debugger based on RPDB2 the WinPDB Back End Unit Tester Perform unit tests Docbook browser Browse local docbook Todo manager Manage a personnal todo list per project RFC Viewer Download RFC index, search and view RFC pages inside PIDA Bazaar This plugin, developed outside of the project, integrates lots of Bazaar function that are not included in the base version control integration

PIDA is a great way of keep using Vim and have a nice GUI around to help you work faster with the file browser, the project manager and the internal shells. You can get more info on using and developing PIDA in the handbook

There are official packages available in both Debian and Ubuntu for a long time now.

And remember: PIDA LOVES YOU!