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Using Komodo Edit as a Python Editor

Posted by Andy (admin) on May 28 2013
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 I love text editors.  While I'm still partial to emacs, that's a bit heavy for beginning programmers.  My favorite of the current crop of editors is Komodo Edit.  This terrific editor is available free for every operating system. You can get Komodo edit for free from this site: http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit (Note there is a commercial version called Komodo IDE. Feel free to check this out if you want, but the free version is fine for most use.)  

Komodo edit is perfect for web development in its default state, but if you want to edit Python code, you'll need a mechanism for running your Python programs.  Fortunately, this is very easy to do.  

The first thing you'll need to do is ensure you have Python up and running on your local machine.  If you can go to the command line, type 'python' and have the python interpreter pop up, you're good to go.  If you've installed python but it doesn't run from the command line, (or you have multiple versions installed) you'll need to do a little detective work first.  Do a search to discover exactly where the python executable is. Windows machines normally have a Python2* directory directly under the C drive. It doesn't matter exactly where the file is, but you'll need to know that directory.

Inside Komodo Edit, turn on the Toolbox tab. There's an icon for this on the main menu, or you can choose View -> Tabs and Sidebars -> Toolbox from the menu system.  Right click in the toolbox and select Add -> New Command from the context menu. 

Make the following changes to the command in the resulting dialog:

Note that if you have portable python installed on a USB stick, you may need to edit the environment variable when you switch machines.  The drive name of a portable drive is unpredictable. 

Last changed: May 28 2013 at 4:47 PM

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