Eclipse as a Maya IDE

I've been a hobbyist programmer for over a decade (damn, has it really been that long already?) and by necessity a semi-professional scripter for a little over 3 years. For the vast majority of that I was perfectly content to use an advanced text editor. As long as I had my color coding and and the occasional bracket mis-match highlighting, I was set. I even went so far as to program the entirety of my genetics sim game in SciTE.

Only a few months ago did I decide to finally see what all the fuss was about with IDEs. It took a day of tutorial diving in order to get Eclipse complete functional and communicating with Maya, but boy was it work it!

I set out this morning to put together a small stack of my tiny tools that my friends could download and benefit from, but instead of fixing one minor world-parent bug like I was supposed to, I felt the urge to praise Eclipse somewhere. And hey, it's Saturday. I might as well celebrate. ;)

Most of the scripting I've been required to do in Maya is incredibly small scale. Someone on the team has a problem, some tedious task really need to do but which will take hours by hand. We're a small studio and just don't have time to waste like that, so I get called up to make a fix. It's usually between 2-5 lines of python.

For things like that there's really no need to go beyond Maya's own script editor.

But sometimes there are larger pieces of code to work on. Sometimes I see an inefficiency in the way we do things and know that while we don't have time in any specific project for it, if I set aside a little of my personal time I could come up with a tool that would really benefit the team. It could be anywhere from a half page of code to an entire auto-rigging set-up.

For those projects I have officially fallen in love with Eclipse. I adore the variable instance highlighting, and the auto-completion features. They're not perfect, and sometimes can't identify what I need just when I could most use a multiple-choice list to pick from, but they're leaps and bounds beyond what you get from an advanced text editor alone.

As I'm entirely self taught and totally spoiled on the documentation of PHP, I really enjoy the way I can guess at what a command should be, get a hit from the auto-complete features, and then use that as a targeted documentation search to verify I'm using the right thing. It's much faster than stopping to look up commands without any leads.

I sort of feel like an idiot for not jumping on IDEs the first time I heard about them. Now if only I could convince my friends of how awesome they are! ...or to make the jump from MEL to Python, for that matter. And from there to PyMel! AND THEN THE WORLD! MWAHAHAHAA!

*cough* Or you know, just to PyMel.