I selected PyDev (http://pydev.sourceforge.net/) as the tool to start out with. There seems to be huge enthusiasm for plain-text editors in the Python community. No doubt, it's fun to improvise on the command line. I liken the feeling to going back to nature -- grabbing hold of the rough edges and learning to love them. But I've grown too addicted to more full-featured editors.
PyDev is an open-source Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) plug-in with a pretty healthy feature set -- code completion, syntax highlighting, integrated debugging, refactoring, unit testing, third-party plug-ins, and on and on. The main criticisms I see about PyDev are about the complexity/overhead of Eclipse and the fact that you need to run it on a pretty beefy machine. After years of Visual Studio, I'm used to omnibus IDEs. And the machines I use have some horsepower.
I saw that PyDev was recently purchased by Aptana. I don't know enough about the Python ecosystem to know if I should be concerned that PyDev will go a commercial route. But I suppose on the scale of worries, that one is pretty small.
So off I go.
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