Over the years my Development Environments have changed quite a lot. When I started writing scripts in Bash and Perl, I used VIM. As I used Linux on the Desktop, and my scripts were not that complex, it worked great at the time. After that, I tried Komodo and ended up using Eclipse with the Perl plugins. Eclipse always felt a bit bloated and oversized and I was always happy when I did not have to use it.

For a long time I stuck to VIM and had one or two Terminal windows open on the side to run scripts and a browser to look up the documentation. Now that my scripts and modules get more complex, I wanted to take another look and see if anything has changed in the world of IDEs in the last couple of years.

This coincided with my switch from VIM to Atom as my default editor, so naturally I looked at Atom’s plugins first. And I liked what I found! I decided to start with the following packages:

• linter-flake8
• linter-python-pep8
• autocomplete-python
• django-templates
• python-debugger

Since it is never a good idea to install multiple Python versions and the required modules directly to the system, installing Virtualenv is a must! I also discovered Virtualwrapper, which makes creating and managing virtual environments much easier!

Python on Mac OS X is quite old, and I do not want to mess it up by accident, so I always install Python and pip via Homebrew.

Use pip to install virtualenv and the wrapper

pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Export Python and VirtualEnv settings (.bashrc)

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python3.5
export WORKON_HOME="${HOME}/venv"
export PROJECT_HOME="${HOME}/devel"
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

Install Atom packages with all requirements

$ pip install pep8 flake8 jedi flake8-docstrings
$ apm install linter-flake8 linter-python-pep8 autocomplete-python django-templates python-debugger

It is great to have a style guide directly in Atom! It is also awesome to be able to use the Python Debugger and go step by step through the code, or auto-complete functions, arguments and variables. All these little packages are a tremendous help. I think, I will stick to this for a while.