Eric Python IDE

Eric Python IDE

Eric is a free integrated development environment for the Python and Ruby programming languages. Eric4 is the variant for Python 2 and eric5 is the one for Python 3.

By design, it acts as a front end for several programs, for example the QScintilla editor widget, the python language interpreter, Rope for code refactoring, Python Profiler for code profiling. Any functionality that is not required does not have to be installed. It is written using the PyQt Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit. It is extensible via a plug-in mechanism. The eric plug-in repository provides various kinds of extensions and is accessible from within the IDE.

The main features are a project manager, an editor with syntax highlighting, debugging, profiling, running python code with support for command-line parameters, unit testing, user interface design, a console for program output and a task manager (self-updating TODO list).

Several allusions are made to the British comedy group Monty Python, which the Python programming language is named after. Eric alludes to Eric Idle, a member of the group, and IDLE (Python), the standard python IDE shipped with most distributions.