So I’ve recently been giving Eclipse (and PyDev) a try for developing Python. Despite my initial hesitation of switching away from Vim, I’ve found it to be quite productive. My text editing speed is not nearly as good as in Vim due to the not-as-functional text editor but I think the IDE capabilities more than make up for it by reducing my save-run cycle drastically. I’m aware of Eclim, the Vim interface to Eclipse, but have thus far been unable to get it to work on my system.

One other major sticking point for me is that we tend to organize our projects in a way that the main modules are in the <packagename>/ directory while the scripts users interact with are in a bin/ directory.

The problem is that the scripts do not have an extension and apparently Eclipse can only associate file types with an extension. There’s literally no other way to tell it that these files are also Python scripts. There’s even a bug that’s been open since 2004 regarding the issue!

So there are two possible solutions:

1. Rename all my scripts to have a .py extension

2. Manually open each one by right-clicking an selecting “Open with Pydev”

So far I’m going to try opting for option 2, since we just standardized on having user scripts without a .py extension. I’m going to see how that works out and revisit the topic later.