Ninja IDE: written in Python for Pythonists

by mmariani • 14 years ago

234 132 14 years ago

gfosco2• 14 years ago

As soon as I see the words "cross-platform" on an IDE, I'm no longer interested. Looks really nice though, they did a good job with branding.

mjs7231• 14 years ago

This is a very strange reason not to like a product. Care to elaborate why?

gfosco2• 14 years ago

Oh, the old saying "Write once, run crappily everywhere." See the other comments already talking about it crashing or having weird behavior. It's something I've come to after many years of trying cross-platform apps that involve a GUI... They are almost all terrible.

I hope the group who agrees with me is cancelling out all the down-votes I got for expressing a valid & common opinion. :)

e1ven2• 14 years ago

In this case, it runs using X11 on OSX, which is a terrible way of making software ;)

bitwize• 14 years ago

There's no such thing as a cross-platform GUI layer that doesn't suck.

Qt comes the closest, and it has all sorts of platform-specific hacks in it, some even visible at the API level.

If you're going to be writing something that's used as frequently and intensively as an IDE, then it had BETTER conform to the user interface guidelines of whatever OS it's running on. Those differ on Windows or Mac, and Linux doesn't really have any.

smacktoward• 14 years ago

I can't speak for gfosco, but my guess would be that it's because in IDE-land "cross-platform" frequently means "written in Java" (as with Eclipse, NetBeans, etc.), with all the performance issues and not-quite-perfect platform look and feel that implies.

pbreit2• 14 years ago

You really can't think of any reasons why a person would suspect a cross-platform IDE to be a waste of time? I stupidly downloaded the 141MB only to find out it requires X11 (ugh) on a Mac which isn't even included in MacOS anymore (yuck). Delete.

kghose• 14 years ago

It is FOSS (GPLv3). The license information was a wee bit hard to find (Wayyy down on the about page http://ninja-ide.org/about/) and I first thought it was some frankenstein freemuim product where you had to apply for a free license if you were an OSS devel (like PyCharm) etc. etc.

I gave it a whirl:

1. Snappy, which is nice, since PyCharm can be sluggish on my Mac 2. No VCS integration 3. By default very strict code checking is turned on, which turns my (functional) code into a sea of underlines, which is not so pretty

It looks to be an interesting start, but it will need VCS integration before it looks suitable as a PyCharm replacement.

I didn't look in detail at code completion/code assist, which PyCharm does very well.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> I didn't look in detail at code completion/code assist, which PyCharm does very well.

Also various refactorings (both refactoring-refactorings and smaller rewriting which PyCharm/IntelliJ calls "intentions")

fmoralesc• 14 years ago

It has bazaar and git plugins (check the Addins menu).

vvpan• 14 years ago

I would rather have developers work on the IDE than make yet another GUI interface for Git. You have the command line for that.

abhinavg• 14 years ago

I think you mean "yet another GUI for Git."

"GUI Interface" expands to "Graphical User Interface Interface."

Sorry, I could not help myself.

gatox4• 14 years ago

We have some videos about Code Completion in NINJA-IDE:

http://youtu.be/xCqiOEXfZd4 http://youtu.be/auVJF44XSnM http://youtu.be/tA_BJBLdduQ

ishbits• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why, but I've never used the VCS integration in an IDE.

joelhooks• 14 years ago

Jetbrains integrates them so freakin well - it's hard not to use them

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

It's nice in Netbeans, because I can see which lines I've changed while I'm editing, and if I hover over the sidebar it will show me what I've changed or deleted. Probably they all do that, but Netbeans is the only IDE I bother with.

I won't say it's indispensable, but it is handy. I don't miss it outside of Netbeans though.

nakkiel• 14 years ago

There are plugins that add support for bzr and git.

ninetax• 14 years ago

It would be great to see some screen shots.

wsc981• 14 years ago

Yep, I was quite annoyed when browsing to their site that I can't find any screenshots at all. And as someone mentioned, a video would be nice as well.

I'm a bit reluctant to download an app with so little information except from a sparse bit of text.

indiecore• 14 years ago

Nice, it would be good to have some screenshots and stuff though, I'll definitely check it out.

unohoo• 14 years ago

What would really help is a small demo video just to get a whiff of what the IDE feels like. The description and screenshots are somehow not enough for me to download and install an entire IDE and take a test drive. If there is a demo video somewhere, my apologies - I was not able to find it.

tonylampada• 14 years ago

There's one on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDlWk_Z7JPQ

reledi• 14 years ago

It's also a year old.

gatox4• 14 years ago

We don't have tutorials yet, but you could take a look at a couple of videos about Code Completion in NINJA-IDE:

http://youtu.be/xCqiOEXfZd4 http://youtu.be/auVJF44XSnM http://youtu.be/tA_BJBLdduQ

rxc1782• 14 years ago

This is nice, but one quick question, why's the windows installer in spanish?

briancurtin• 14 years ago

Most (all?) of the team is based in Argentina. I'll bring it up to one of the devs (a coworker).

gatox4• 14 years ago

Yes, as Brian mentioned, most of the team is from argentina, as the windows packager, we already take care of that for the next release.

rxc1782• 14 years ago

Thats cool, its not a problem. I really like the tool though, great job!

buster• 14 years ago

Wow.. how did this not make it to HN before? Already version 2.1.1 and never heard of it?

recuter• 14 years ago

Something something second system syndrome, just use vim/emacs/sublime. 'etc.

hoka• 14 years ago

I'll definitely give it a shot.

From a usability perspective, your download button could be better. It doesn't download right away (which is fine), but redirects to downloads/win for me. Might be nice to have it auto-scroll to the win downloads since it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

Here's a screenshot from Win7 32-bit: http://i.imgur.com/2RT6u.png

That random pink line makes it unusable for me.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

It looks like that delimits an 80 char width.

kstenerud3• 14 years ago

Pretty cool all around, but it needs a lot more stability work. It crashed a few times just scrolling around in some of my python projects, and there are quirks such as complaining "This font can not be used in this editor" if I open the font selector and then click "Cancel".

Also, changing the margin line doesn't seem to take effect unless you quit and restart the IDE.

kstenerud3• 14 years ago

After a few hours use I'll definitely say the robustness is not there :(

I can't use it for more than 10 minutes without it crashing, which is a shame because it looks really nice.

silasb• 14 years ago

Is this based on QT Creator?

stevoski• 14 years ago

How does this compare to PyCharm?

ecaroth• 14 years ago

I'm wondering the exact same thing.

jra101• 14 years ago

Would be nice to be able to selectively disable some PEP 8 rules in the style checker. I don't care about lines longer than 80 characters and I don't like separating functions by two empty lines.

Derbasti4• 14 years ago

But, PEP8, man. It's the LAW!

/kidding

Luyt2• 14 years ago

Yes, and no: from the PEP8 style guide: (my emphasis)

"Consistency with this style guide is important. Consistency within a project is more important. Consistency within one module or function is most important. But most importantly: know when to be inconsistent -- sometimes the style guide just doesn't apply."

nirvanatikku• 14 years ago

Crashed while scrolling =( Was curious, but can't see myself moving away from PyCharm/Sublime.

misleading_name2• 14 years ago

Ditto.

yuvadam• 14 years ago

Don't know about the IDE but that font is horrendous.

jlujan• 14 years ago

On mountain lion, it requires X11. Not sure why as my PyQT apps do not.

endtime• 14 years ago

Having very recently switched to Sublime Text 2 (from Komodo Edit), I'm curious if this offers anything that can't be done with Sublime + mature existing plugins...?

camus• 14 years ago

I use python with sublime text 2 which is great but not as great as eclipse with the python plugin. I'm learning django right now and even with the code intel , it is hard to discover the api without going to the doc. ST2 is blazing fast ,but sometimes a more heavier ide is better ( and i can launch manage.py shell from eclise which is top notch )

Derbasti4• 14 years ago

Does ST2 have a REPL? (This is no value statement. I honestly want to know.)

heartbreak• 14 years ago

Yes. View >> Show Console.

isxek• 14 years ago

There's also a separate ST2 package called SublimeREPL that supports other languages (https://github.com/wuub/SublimeREPL).

zdanozdan• 14 years ago

whats wrong with emacs ?

hack_edu• 14 years ago

Apples, meet oranges.

Derbasti4• 14 years ago

Nothing at all. Emacs is wonderful. But that says nothing at all about Ninja.

martinced• 14 years ago

The thing wrong with Emacs is that not enough people know Lisp / elisp / CL well enough to enhance Emacs and hence prefer to create new "non programmable editors" instead of enhancing Emacs : (

As a long time Emacs user this saddens me a lot.

kstenerud3• 14 years ago

Some people just want a specialized tool for a particular job, rather than a swiss army knife that requires a lot of fiddling and presents you with a ton of stuff you can't use for your current task.

zlapper• 14 years ago

As others have already mentioned, PEP8 validation is enable by default, which is a little excessive in my opinion (specially with the line < 80 chars rule). It would be great to be able to disable individual rules, a la Ecliplse/Netbeans.

All in all it looks very nice, thanks for sharing.

mikle2• 14 years ago

I think that we as an industry need to drop the 80 char per line rule.

mgrouchy• 14 years ago

I don't.

I have a fairly large screen (27inch cinema display) and use Vim. 80 Character lines are perfect. They look nicer, are easy to read (in the same way books are easy to read when lines are not super long) and with vim can accommodate ~4 split windows side by side which is useful.

wildranter• 14 years ago

No, we shouldn't. It's about just the right line length to mate reading a lot easier. Take a look at this to see what I mean [1]. Another thing, one liners are great, and I love them too. But they don't hurt only readability.

[1] http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/finetypography/ht/line_length...

sho_hn5• 14 years ago

Can someone explain to me why this is at the top of the front page despite a website devoid of useful detail, while this completely fails to catch on: http://scummos.blogspot.de/2012/11/kdev-python-14-stable-rel...

(Seriously, check it out - KDevelop's Python plugin and Microsoft's PTVS are currently the two projects doing serious work on static analysis of Python for live editing purposes. Here's a nice subthread comparing the two: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4725634)

streptomycin2• 14 years ago

I'd guess it's due to KDE's general lack of popularity. Typically, nothing done under the KDE umbrella gets noticed.

sho_hn5• 14 years ago

I'm going to guess you're based in the US, because the two big Linux desktop camps are indeed somewhat split along the continents as far as mindshare goes. Makes me wonder about the exact breakdown by geographical area of the HN readership :).

khill• 14 years ago

Perhaps because not everyone is doing development on KDE?

The Ninja-IDE supports linux, windows, and osx so it has broader appeal.

sho_hn5• 14 years ago

That's a good point, although I feel that "development on KDE" needs a response: KDevelop isn't limited to making KDE applications, and KDE applications like KDevelop aren't limited to running inside the KDE shell - the major Linux desktops are quite interoperable today as far as running applications goes. Furthermore, generally speaking KDE apps are also available for Windows (via the KDE Windows installer) and OS X (via distibutions like Fink), although both platforms are considered experimental deployment targets for KDevelop.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

Thank you a lot for this! This is really impressive.

A shame that it probably will be a bit tricky to get this running on OSX...

Maybe a good starting point is here: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/pull/8511

milliams2• 14 years ago

Indeed. I tried out Ninja about 6 months ago. While it was very nice I found it just didn't compare to KDevelop in terms of features and ease of use (admittedly I am also using to KDevelop for C++ work).

rplnt3• 14 years ago

I had no luck with Python under KDevelop (tried it something over a year ago). It worked, but not really as an IDE. I liked it for C though, maybe it would be worth trying it again.

And it might be silly but I really loved the KDE's variable coloring. Example for those who don't know: http://www.kdevelop.org/sites/kdevelop.org/files/photos/Kdev... Basically every variable name is hashed and colored differently. Upside is that different variables have different colors in the code and the orientation was much easier/quicker. Downside is that you sometimes catch yourself renaming variable just to have a different color.

DodgyEggplant• 14 years ago

Wing IDE is great

xyzzy123• 14 years ago

"Me too". I've tried many Python IDEs, settled down with Wing IDE.

The one feature I truly love in that IDE is "debug probe". Once you breakpoint (or hit an unhandled exception), you can walk up and down the call stack and evaluate arbitrary expressions in any frame. SO handy.

btipling• 14 years ago

It can't seem to create or open JavaScript files. How does one use it with Django?

shill• 14 years ago

I am already extremely satisfied with PyCharm. I'll keep an eye on this though. Being able to write plugins in Python is promising.

masukomi• 14 years ago

am i the only one who's really wishing there were some real screenshots to check out before downloading the thing?

spindritf• 14 years ago

"For Ubuntu Users: You can add the NINJA-IDE PPA and install it from there (you will get automatic updates!)"

http://ninja-ide.org/downloads/

Thank you.

gatox4• 14 years ago

Hello, I'm part of the NINJA-IDE Team, and first to all, I would like to thank everyone for the feedback (good ones, as much as bad). Currently we are working to make NINJA-IDE compatible with Python3 (among other features) and taking care of several issues to ensure better stability (and guide the development process with tests).

I hope we can find the time to take care of some of the stuff mentioned here as videos, screenshots, user guide, etc.

It's a lot of work, but we are proud of what we can achieve with a free software project.

Thx everyone!

ketralnis• 14 years ago

I realise these are at first blush, but:

* Scrolling is way too slow. This isn't nitpicking, this is really very important to me

* I like PEP8 warnings and use them in other editors, but I don't like not being able to pick which style stuff I care about

* I don't like the PEP8 tooltips. They cover up my code and that's the worst possible place to put them. Even if I do plan to "fix" the issue, coming up over the code that I'm typing right now is never okay.

* It's really quite a lot of work through some confusing terminology to get a test run of the IDE going on an existing project. I don't want to move my code into your workspace. I don't want to import my existing project (that sounds scary)

* Some glaring bugs seem to indicate that this is more young than is indicated on the very flashy project site. For instance, if I try to import a project but cancel the "select a directory" popup, I inconsistently get it either removing my previous selection or crashing the whole IDE

mikle2• 14 years ago

I hate to be that guy, but after almost a decade doing Python one thing I learned is that we prefer Pythonista, not Pythonist.

pablosanta• 14 years ago

It keeps crashing on me. I'm on Lion. :(

Looks good though. I thought it was going to be YET ANOTHER ECLIPSE distribution, but apparently it's not. It seems to be pretty fast. Hope they fix the crashing issue on Lion soon.

neil_s• 14 years ago

The name of the IDE emphasizes that its not just yet another IDE, and yet I don't see anything new here, or any difference from existing IDEs, other than heavy Python support.

veeti• 14 years ago

Although vim has almost completely sucked me in already, does this thing have support for 1) separate indentation settings for different file formats and 2) separate indentation settings for different "projects"?

I've been looking forever for a text editor that does this and surprisingly few do.

jarito• 14 years ago

The IntelliJ family of PyCharm, RubyMine and WebStorm can do this.

amishforkfight• 14 years ago

Confirmed -- I've used WebStorm and it's derivative PHPStorm for several years, they are excellent IDEs.

azinman2• 14 years ago

Tried it out on existing code. Was complaining that spacing wasn't a multiple of 4, when I set it to 2 spaces in the prefs. I even reloaded it and verified the setting.

Back to Sublime!

adamrt• 14 years ago

I don't use this editor but I can almost guarantee that its actually pep8 complaining about spaces. Not that this solves your problem but there is a disconnect between editor configuration and pep8.

Side note: Hope you use 4 spaces on new projects! :)

jotaass• 14 years ago

Just tried it. Looks nice but a bit lacking on the code completion, i think. Maybe I need to give it another chance.

Also, I think would be nice if there was a way to interact with the console after running a script. I realize this may be sort of an odd request, but it is very convenient when you're not quite sure on how you want to solve a problem, and you need to try out some solutions interactively. I greatly enjoy this in spyder, my current python ide of choice.

dmd• 14 years ago

Crashes on launch for me.

jsilence• 14 years ago

same here

gruuby• 14 years ago

I cannot use an IDE that doesn't feature a vi mode for the editor. I'd be very, very lost. I'm yet to find an IDE that doesn't get in my way, vi mode or not.

datashaman3• 14 years ago

QT toolkit. urgh...

pacman128• 14 years ago

Tried it out on Windows. Was liking it, but then discovered that it is converting my files to UNIX format when saving them on Windows!

ezolotko• 14 years ago

Tried it on Windows. Why it is never a commercial-grade UI in projects like this? Why it is not like Idea? Why it is not like Visual Studio? Why it is still glitchy, blinky, brogrammer-art thing?

wcoenen• 14 years ago

My experience when I tried it on Windows 7:

0) Downloaded and installed it. For some reason the installer was in Spanish. Launched the IDE itself. Fortunately it was in English.

1) clicked file - new project, selected python, named it "test"

2) tried to type the project location, it wouldn't let me. Selected the project location via the "Examine..." button instead. (The filesystem browser launched in program files instead of my home folder.)

3) typed print("hello world") in __init__.py

4) hit F6 to run. This doesn't seem to do anything except pop up a save dialog. The only output I get is "Failed to start" with no further indication of what is wrong.

Chosing a "main file" in the project properties didn't seem to make any difference. I don't know how to make this thing execute code.

rplnt3• 14 years ago

> I don't know how to make this thing execute code.

This happens to me basically in every IDE, with every language. I somehow got used to the fact that IDE requires some maintenance prior to working with it. I guess it shouldn't be the case but it is my (limited) experience.

misleading_name2• 14 years ago

Looks pretty, but I opened a 200 line python file on Mountain Lion and it crashed after 30 seconds. Also the scrolling was annoyingly "jumpy".... just not smooth.

Ninja IDE: written in Python for Pythonists

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