NetBeans Screenshot of the Week #32: Python Import Management

We're about to release an early access release of Python support for NetBeans. We have ambitious goals for the Python support: NetBeans should be the best IDE for Python development, bar none! Over the next couple of weeks I'll post screenshots of a bunch of editor related features for Python. Today I'll start with a feature near and dear to my heart: Import Management. I used to be a die hard XEmacs user. When I started coding in Java, I continued using emacs for a couple of years. And the feature which finally made me abandon emacs for a Java IDE? You guessed it -- import management. If I wanted to use for example the List class, I could just press a keystroke to choose which List class I had in mind, and the import statement was added for it at the top of the file while I could continue working in the middle of the file somewhere. To be sure, this is not rocket science, and Emacs support for Java has improved a lot over the years. But at the time, this was a huge productivity boost and coupled with other code-intelligence and navigation features was enough to lure my away from my comfort zone in the IDE to what was a less powerful plain text editor, but a more powerful Java coding tool. Anyway, Python shares some similarities with Java. There are lots of libraries, and you need to import modules before you can use them. And this is where NetBeans' Python support can help. Let's say I've tried calling the cmp method...

Date: November, 11 2008
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/netbeans_screenshot_of_the_week

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