Introduction

What's PIDA?

From the PIDA home page:

PIDA is an IDE (integrated development environment). PIDA is different from other IDEs in that it will use the tools you already have available rather than attempting to reinvent each one. PIDA is written in Python with the PyGTK toolkit, and although is designed to be used to program in any language, PIDA has fancy Python IDE features.

Out of the box, some of those fancy IDE features are:

• Embedded vim or emacs as the editor
• Project organization, with per-project configurable run commands
• Real-time error checking
  
• SVN integration
• File browser
• Open buffer list
• Embedded terminals

PIDA has a plugin system that can be used to easily install more features like:

• Python source tree
• TODO parser
• Pastebin integration
• Trac bug list integration
• Graphical debugging

You can, of course, get most of this functionality for Plone development from IDEs like Wing or Eclipse (with PyDev Extensions) - but PIDA is 100% Free, and we like that :-)

Before we go any further, here's a screenshot of PIDA in action, debugging Plone's MembershipTool.py on a running Zope:

Ok, let's get started...