Itinerant Source

Working with large code bases like Zope and Plone can quickly give your hands a workout. I’ve been looking around for some good python completion tools that i can use directly from textmate or emacs.

the critical comparison test for any such tools.

• works well with large codebases.
• opensource

ctags/gtags

not directly related to completion, but exuberant tags / ctags gives the ability to lookup symbol (classes, methods, functions) definitions, and jump around a code base is incredibly useful. conceivably you could build a usable completion tool directly from a ctags file, that did symbol completion rather than context aware completion.

http://ctags.sourceforge.net/

gtags, a variant from google, sets up source with a client/server index, and is more appropriate for a symbol completion scenario.

rope

http://rope.sourceforge.net

a re-factoring library. lots of unit tests. editing centric api is a bit of challenge to use for the lightweight integration i’m looking for.

KomodoEdit

was recently open-sourced. Komodo is a pretty nice dynamic language ide with supprot for ruby/perl/python/xslt and more. Some of the more critical features for an IDE were unfortunately not included in the opensourcing, like a debugger. it does however have a very nice cross language code intelligence system (codeintel package), based on static analysis. which with a little bit of effort could be made into a nice library for use any ide.

http://www.openkomodo.com/

PyDev

the eclipse plugins seems to utilize a dynamic inspection in a separate thread with a socket interface for driving the system via the GUI. the technique at least easily ported to other environments, although i cringe at the notion of random code execution by such a tool.