Eclipse for Chimera Development

These notes used the Ubuntu 10.04 package for eclipse, which provided: Eclipse SDK 3.5.2 (Build id: M20100211-1343). See the ​eclipse site for other downloads.

Eclipse Plugins

The ​PyDev plugin was installed, using the Eclipse: Help > Install New Software utility, by adding the http://pydev.org/updates site.

For a tour of using PyDev with Eclipse, see Ron Smith (2004), ​Python development with Eclipse and Ant.

For a useful vi emulation in eclipse, see ​viplugin. An alternative is ​eclim.

Configure PyDev Preferences

Create a new workspace (e.g., Eclipse - File > Switch Workspace > Other) for the new Chimera workspace settings. Then use Window > Preferences to locate the PyDev panels to setup the "Interpreter - Python" to use the Chimera ​python2.7 interpreter (be sure to manually add $CHIMERA/share and $CHIMERA/lib to the "system PYTHONPATH" configuration). Then set some ​Chimera environment variables (the $PATH and $CHIMERA syntax did not work, so these environment settings use full paths; the paths must point to hard-links in the file system, Chimera doesn't work with symbolic-links). Finally, an optional addition is to create a VirtualEnv for Chimera and add the pylint package, then configure the ​pylint preferences. It should be configured now to enable importing Chimera modules and ​running Chimera.