Debugging Python on Emacs IDE

I've tried a few IDEs for standalone Python development. But end of the day I came back to Emacs. I love Emacs because it is lightweight, I can pretty much do whatever I can with any other IDE and much more if I write some Lisp script.

Here in this article, I'd just cover how to step through your standalone Python code and debug it using Emacs as the editor/IDE. First of all you have to install the following Emacs extension modules and Python debugging tools.

• Install Pymacs from this github site and thank François Pinard of Montreal for programming it
• Install Rope and Ropemacs from here (using Mercury)
• Check if you have PDB, just by typing it on command window (you'd mostly have)

Now the step-by-step debugging goes like this

1. With your Python program on buffer, type M-x pdb. It would ask if you want to run PDB like, pdb a.out. Replace a.out with your Python module name. In the screenshot, it is adder.py (doing nothing useful).
2. This opens a new PDB windows (Screenshot)
3. Go to the lines where you need breakpoint, type C-x (you can notice the screenshot for the statement about it). If you are using Ubuntu, you get a very good look-n-feel, like that screenshot.
4. Type c on the PDB buffer to run upto the breakpoint
5. From the breakpoint, n for next line or s to explore into functions on that line. In Ubuntu, you'd have a GUI to assist you.
6. To watch a variable, type p var, as in the screenshot.
7. Any time during debugging, w prints out the stack and u and d lets you go up and down the stack.

For most of the standalone Python script, this would improve your productivity a lot. You can do more complex debug operations, but this is a very good start.

Browserling

With all your web apps and client side scripts, cross-browser testing is vital. Great were the roaring 90s when Internet Explorer was the only browser. But now the end user uses any browser, mostly either Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari. Despite several standardizations, there is no guarantee that scripts in one browser would run in the other. And as an end-user, the message "this page works only in Firefox" is the biggest turn off for me.

Here is an easy way of testing how your web UI looks in different browsers without really installing the browsers in your computer. Through Browserling. It's an open source node.js based StackVM implementation by Peteris Krumins, and you can follow the growth of this project and all his node.js tools, here.