Problems

If you've followed along this far, I think you'll agree that PIDA can be very useful for Plone product development. But, it's not a completely mature product, so expect a few glitches here and there. Here are a few that I've encountered:

• As I mentioned in Getting Started, PIDA's emacs integration didn't work for me. To be honest, I've only had emacs installed for two days. I don't know much about it, and there may have been something in my configuration that was getting in the way. If you need emacs in PIDA, these instructions may help.
  
• You cannot dismiss the debugger once you open it - the panel stays visible no matter what you do. I think this might be fixed in PIDA SVN.
• On my system, PIDA would sometimes not exit cleanly, forcing me to kill the process. This was particularly noticeable after using the debugger.
• Even after an apparently clean shutdown, PIDA sometimes leaves leftover processes running on my system. Usually it's a pida process and a svn process.

Disabling the debugger plugin seems to solve the last three items, so a simple workaround is to enable that plugin only when you need it.

So, yes, you may encounter a few warts, but in my experience, they don't get in the way of normal development. Your mileage may vary, of course.