Python development environment
eric is a free integrated development environment (IDE) used for computer programming. Since it is a full featured IDE, it provides by default all necessary tools needed for the writing of code and for the professional management of a software project.
eric is written in the programming language Python and its primary use is for developing software written in Python. It is usable for development of any combination of Python 3 or Python 2, Qt 5 or Qt 4 and PyQt 5 or PyQt 4 projects, on Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms.
License, price and distribution.
eric is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later and is thereby Free Software. This means in general terms that the source code of eric can be studied, changed and improved by anyone, that eric can be run for any purpose by anyone and that eric - and any changes or improvements that may have been made to it - can be redistributed by anyone to anyone as long as the license is not changed (copyleft).
eric can be downloaded at SourceForge and installed manually with a python installer script.
Most major Linux distributions include eric in their software repositories, so when using such Linux distributions eric can be obtained and installed automatically by using the package manager of the particular distribution.
Additionally, the author offers access to the source code via a public Mercurial repository.
Characteristics.
eric is written in Python and uses the PyQt Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit. By design, eric acts as a front end for several programs, for example the QScintilla editor widget.
Features.
The key features of eric 6 are:
Support for Python 2 and 3.
Prior to the release of eric version 5.5.0, eric version 4 and eric version 5 coexisted and were maintained simultaneously, while eric 4 was the variant for writing software in Python version 2 and eric version 5 was the variant for writing software in Python version 3.
With the release of eric version 5.5.0 both variants had been merged into one, so that all versions as of eric version 5.5.0 support writing software in Python 2 as well as in Python 3, making the separate development lanes of eric version 4 and 5 obsolete. Those two separate development lanes are no longer maintained, and the last versions prior to merging them both to 5.5.0 were versions 4.5.25 and 5.4.7.
Releases.
Versioning scheme.
Until 2016, eric used a software versioning scheme with a three-sequence identifier, e.g. 5.0.1. The first sequence represents the major version number which is increased when there are significant jumps in functionality, the second sequence represents the minor number, which is incremented when only some features or significant fixes have been added, and the third sequence is the revision number, which is incremented when minor bugs are fixed or minor features have been added.
From late 2016, the version numbers show the year and month of release, e.g. 16.11 for November 2016.
Release strategy.
eric follows the development philosophy of "Release early, release often", following loosely a time-based release schedule. Currently a revision version is released around the first weekend of every month, a minor version is released annually, in most cases approximately between December and February.
Version history.
The following table shows the version history of eric, starting from version 4.0.0.
Only major (e.g. 6.0.0) and minor (e.g. 6.1.0) releases are listed; revision releases (e.g. 6.0.1) are omitted.
Name.
Several allusions are made to the British comedy group Monty Python, which the Python programming language is named after. Eric alludes to Eric Idle, a member of the group, as does IDLE, the standard python IDE shipped with most distributions.
Criticism.
The Eric Python IDE does not feature an integrated toolchain for now.
References.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;