I wrote a python add-in for MonoDevelop last year. Unfortunately, I have a hard time sticking to a single project and therefore it suffered a bit. However, we are getting ready for feature freeze for MonoDevelop 2.2 and so I kicked my ars in gear to fix a few things.
Namely, the code completion is much more bearable. Most of the other niceties come from general improvement in MonoDevelop over the last year. You can thank the incredibly talented folks that run the project for that.
For readers that don't know what monodevelop-python is about, let me show you a couple of the features quick.
MonoDevelop knows where you are within the file. It provides a couple drop-down menus to help you jump around in large files.
It knows when you have typed incorrect syntax. The python add-in will continually check your syntax as you type so you always know immediately when you have syntax errors. 
Like PyFlakes? So do I, so the add-in will also lint through common mistakes and underline those in yellow.
What good is code completion if its limited to your current file? Seriously, how useless was that before? Well, now, if you configure the path to your site modules monodevelop will parse those files too and build a code completion index to help you along. It's great for exploring API's! Unfortunately, it doesn't yet work well against libraries like pygtk where most of the data is provided dynamically at runtime from a shared library.
There is plenty more to do for this add-in and I hope I can continue to have time to improve it. But life is crazy like that, and you never know. I'm really quite interested in what people use for a debugger in python. I'd like to add one, but if "pdb" is the best that's universally available then I'm not sure how awesome it can get. Go ahead and leave a comment on what you would like to see and what debugger suggestions you have.
Oh, and here is a little screencast displaying what the add-in looks like live http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW-lNuoSNv0.
Comments (19)
Thanks for giving this an upgrade
I’m sorry it took so long!
Looks really great, can’t wait to try it!
Yeah!! Looks very impressive. Thanks so much, I can’t wait.
P.S. Can you delete my previous post? I didn’t mean to publish my email address! Lol
Looks nice.
O/T: What wallpaper is that?
What’s that background image and where can I get it? It looks great!
This looks great; I’m a huge MD fan and Python support will be a huge boost to my Python use.
As for a debugger? It is all crap, Python hasn’t matured to that level yet. Maybe with IronPython.
Thanks for the comments!
I’d host the image myself, but I’m not sure what the license is. Here is the result I found for the filename.
http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y24/Generalchicken/?action=view¤t=1228519704511.jpg
That looks different, and it is only 800×500.
Thank You. I’ve been waiting for this for quite some time!
Isaiah, I found it!
http://zyklophon.deviantart.com/art/Hardwood-w-Lights-66313387
Rather embarrassing that a fully featured IDE for python has to be from “Mono”develop .
Great work btw, especially with in regards to explaining the features. Linux developers could learn a lot from you.
@pt
Rather embarrassing that a fully featured IDE for python has to be from “Mono”develop .
Well, this is just a plugin, which might interest developers who want to write python in MonoDevelop. It is by no means the only fully featured IDE for python.
Netbeans and eclipse have better plugins than this, to name a few. Stani’s Python Editor (SPE) is a full featured python only IDE, with debugging and UML modelling supported, along with the standard features expected from an IDE.
Please note that this is just an effort to bring python support to MonoDevelop.
@pt : The MonoDevelop team emphasises that it (MonoDevelop) is not only an IDE for programming in C#.
Does really an IDE for Python have to be written in Python as well? I don’t really care, as long as it works..
Shit looks incredible dude. I seriously cannot wait to try this.
Well, I would love to try it out, but it is not included in the Ubuntu repositories. I am new to mono and am just starting with MD. This feature is actually the stop gap for me moving the MD in any amount of real development. I com from an Eclipse programming back ground in java, python, C/C++ development. I am justing to learn C# and was hoping to have all the features I have in Eclipse as well as a few extras. I guess I will have to wait a few years before moving from Eclipse and java to MonoDevelop and C#. It does look promising though, and I can’t hardly wait!
@adam, we just reached feature freeze in 2.2. When we get to the release candidate stage, I’ll add monodevelop builds to my apt repository.
It would sure be nice to know how to add python to monodevelop. It is not in the addin repo. No word whatsoever to speak where the hell I might get it. Do they think we just conjure it out of thin air?
Thomas, It is part of the official monodevelop project. On ubuntu that would mean apt-get install monodevelop-python (and probably similar on openSuSE and other distros).