Maya & Eclipse IDE

[Hirazi Blue]

Quick tip:
If you plan to use Maya for some serious scripting, ditching the default Maya script editor would seem a wise move. Luckily there is a way to use the renowned open source Eclipse IDE in conjunction with Maya. The procedure to get all of this up and running can be found here. Might seem overkill for simple tasks, but it really is a significant improvement over the default Maya script editor (that for one thing "eats" your code, when you press "execute", unless you highlight it).
;)

[iamVFX]

Why you ditched its script editor?

[Hirazi Blue]

Well, it's mostly personal preference, obviously. The short time I tried working with it, I learned to dislike it. So when I went to the forums and noticed I wasn't alone in this AND there were alternatives I gladly went with an alternative. I should probably have mentioned that there are several solutions apart from Eclipse, but I have had good experiences with Eclipse in the past. If you're using a single monitor setup, unlike me, however, the Charcoal Editor might be a better option, as it is an actually plugin not an external solution and is fully integrated into the Maya UI. I haven't tried it and it isn't free (but $49 isn't very expensive either). From what I read it gets good reviews also. But apart from Eclipse and Charcoal there are several more options at your disposal.

[luceric]

I hate eclipse. What a bloated, complicated piece of shit. just about anything else is better. But you can use it as an interactive python debugger for Maya, so there's that.

[iamVFX]

I hate eclipse. What a bloated, complicated piece of shit. just about anything else is better.

John Carmack wouldn't agree with you... By the way, Visual Studio and MSVC especially are true, exquisite pieces of shit, it's still better if people would use Eclipse or QtCreator more often.

[EricTRocks]

I hate eclipse. What a bloated, complicated piece of shit. just about anything else is better. But you can use it as an interactive python debugger for Maya, so there's that.

What do you use?

[luceric]

I hate eclipse. What a bloated, complicated piece of shit. just about anything else is better.

John Carmack wouldn't agree with you...

sure he does, he's just saying that this bloated java experiment is running accept acceptably on modern hardware. that's not a glowing endorsement.

[luceric]

I hate eclipse. What a bloated, complicated piece of shit. just about anything else is better. But you can use it as an interactive python debugger for Maya, so there's that.

What do you use?

I'm on the mac. If you're writing a standalone python application, Eclipse does work OK - I actually used Aptana Studio to work on XGen. It's worth the pain of trying to figure out that terrible UI because you'll get autocomplete of python code, and there is a built-in debugger. (the debugger can also be used to remote-debug python code running in Maya) But you have to conform to some extent to how it thinks things (modules, apps..) should be structured. Just figuring out how to get it to run the right thing when you press Run is a challenge onto itself (because it's based on window focus or something -- I can't recall)

Most of the time, having any editor that forces me to create a project is a pain to use, because I work on Maya, a big project with is own makefile and build system, and source code in hundreds of folders. So Xcode or eclipse are out; I spent all of my time in TextWranger. On Windows... Visual Studio at least doesn't force you to do have a project to do a Find in File for something, and it does provide Python Debugging and autocomplete if you figure out what to download, but I'm so far away from VS land now that I just revert to some text editor like PSPad that can open, like textwranger on the mac, a window onto a folder on disk instead of having to build a project and using a project tree to see the file. Of course, the cool kids all use Sublime Text, and the oldies are using Emacs..

[iamVFX]

I hate eclipse. What a bloated, complicated piece of shit. just about anything else is better.

John Carmack wouldn't agree with you...

sure he does, he's just saying that this bloated java experiment is running accept acceptably on modern hardware. that's not a glowing endorsement.

No he's really not, I'm reading his twitter quite often, there was another tweet (before he joined Oculus) where he said that Eclipse is good in what he does (probably Android development or something), just can't find it (p.s. is there a good twitter finder?)

I don't agree with him too, by the way... It's still Java...

And by the way It says a lot about software, if people prefer "bloated java experiments" instead of native solutions.

[luceric]

Just using Eclipse as a text editor requires you to have Java installed, and up-to-date, plus it's about 300 megs on disk even without any compilers. So I think it does deserve to be called bloated if you're not already a java guy. At least Visual Studio excels at compiling and debugging, it's not just an IDE for other things. But what's cool about Eclipse is the integrated downloadable package system and integrated unit testing things, which if you start to use, I guess you probably can't find anywhere else. But to me it looks like a second career to figure out all of that stuff. I can't be bothered and I spent way too much time setting up my workspace to work in Python. There is a lot Maya users that use Nodepad++ for mel and python, btw. There are mel syntax highlight files for just about any text editor.

[luceric]

it really is a significant improvement over the default Maya script editor (that for one thing "eats" your code, when you press "execute", unless you highlight it).

you completely forget about that very quickly, because you learn to run the code with the Execute All button [>>] (a button at the same location as the run button in XSI) or using shift+enter on the numeric keypad. you can also hit ctrl+z to get your script back if you forgot.