[PyKDE] Eric3 First impressions and questions

[Kirill Lapshin]

Hello!

I've tried quite a few python IDEs, and so far I like Eric the most. 
It's a great piece of software. Thanks a lot, and keep up good work!

There are many things I like. Feature set is well thought. Unit tests, 
profiler, coverage statistics, refactoring -- that's very cool. But 
there are some things that don't work for me, and some other things I 
think can be improved.

I apologize in advance if some of my questions are FAQ. I tried to 
search mail list archives, but I could've easily miss something.

1. For some reason profile and coverage statistics does not work for me. 
They run but don't show any reports. Right click on source file -> 
"Show" submenu has "Code coverage" and "Profile data" entries but they 
are inactive. Another weird thing is that when I am trying to profile my 
unittest I get "0 tests run" in the report. Tests set up in usual way

if __name__=='__main':
    unittest.main()

2. There are quite a lot of small annoyances with keyboard shortcuts. I 
am an emacs user, so I wanted to customize shortcuts to be close to 
emacs'. Obvious shortcoming is that there are no double keystrokes (e.g. 
C-X C-S). That's probably not that easy to implement, oh well. Even more 
annoying is that certain commands are not configurable. For example 
there is no way to change "Go to line" keystroke. Alt-BS performs undo, 
even though it is not listed as a registered combination for Undo. I 
tried to assign Alt-BS to delete word on the left, and shortcut 
configuration dialog allowed me to do that, but Alt-BS still does undo. 
I am sure there are more things like this, that's just something I 
noticed in first couple of hours.

3. Too many common operations launch dialogs. I would really love to be 
able to run script without answering questions about command line 
arguments and working dir. Well, for run script there is such 
alternative -- restart script, but for example for UnitTests I see no 
way to run tests with a single key. BTW, while we are at it, it would be 
really nice to make unittest screen a dockable panel rather than 
separate window.

4. Another comment on unittest. Why does it require suite() function? 
Why not run all unittests automatically, akin to unittest.main() if 
suite() is not present? For instance such a suite can be easily created 
this way:

unittest.defaultTestLoader.loadTestsFromModule(module)

I am running eric 3.4 on debian.

--Kirill