I even spend my time criticizing my own software. It is the only way to get things fixed if you honestly look at a piece of software and not instantly say it is gorgeous because I use it. It’s like babies – all mothers think theirs is cute. I can’t stand when people use the “works for me” argument to say there is nothing wrong with an app (it was for too long used as an excuse for not pouring development into X and the desktop because the CLI “works for me, why do I need windows and icons”). I may have been harsh criticizing eclipse but call it the cynicism of many years working directly on GUIs and usability issues (GNOME, OLPC and now WebUI’s). Seeing that dialogue in light of the other post I linked to just brought me back to the stone ages of UI design.

And yes Eclipse is pretty good at a couple of things. I have been using it for the past week and can appreciate some of its features. I also appreciate that Mikko put a lot of work into the PyDev effort and understand his lack of time. I am for one a proponent of widening the appeal of Free Software and Open Source so people can get paid for the useful work they do.

Dude, why should it point out where I have jython for me? I might have several versions installed. On different hard drives even.
PyDev is a great plugin, but I don’t expect it to wipe my ass for me!

If you have not bothered to help out by doing either of these things then I don’t think that you are being at all fair.

Pydev is a one man project.

The dialog you see was written by me many many years ago (2004?). I provided a small subset of patches for Fabio (PyDev’s author) to have new project and new file wizards. Before that there wasn’t such a feature.

For the technical reasons, you need to have Python interpreters configured before the project is created (due to question for the interpreter on the following screen and initial PYTHONPATH configuration). Since I was on the limited time budget, the logic for closing the new project wizard and opening the current settings page would have needed some extra effort and I didn’t create them.

The correct solution would be to have welcome wizard in PyDev which scans for installed interpreters automatically.

Also, the new Python file dialog is horrible and should be revamped. I am not using it, but doing “New -> File” instead.

PyDev itself is much voluntary driven effort. It does not have IBM workforce backing it up, so you cannot really expect the same quality level from it as there is in Eclipse core. The development focus has been in good code insight/autocomplete features and the user interface might not be easy enough for Python newcomers. Many things could be done easier. However, I still believe that PyDev is the best Python IDE effort out there, because it’s being built on massive and polished Eclipse code base (undo, version control integration, diff, tabs and windows, etc.) and we need to reinvent the wheel only for Python specific parts.

Also, if you are willing to throw in some bucks, I can get someone to fix these nuisances for you. Personally I don’t have time to do PyDev development anymore

Cheers,
Mikko Ohtamaa
Oulu, Finland