Eric 6 User's Guide/Getting Started/Overview

Eric is a full featured Python editor and integrated development environment (IDE), written in Python. It has many uses: as an everyday quick-and-dirty Python editor and debugger, as GUI development platform, as a professional project management tool and as a multi-project portfolio manager.

In its most basic form, Eric is an excellent quick-and-dirty Python editor and debugger thanks in part to the tight integration of the highly flexible Scintilla editor control. Eric exposes many of the editor’s settings, allowing the user to customize the visual environment at will.

Eric can support rapid and sophisticated GUI development, through its integration of Qt’s UI toolkit and PyQt, and is itself an excellent demonstration of the power of Python, Qt and PyQt.

Among Eric’s multitude of features are:

   • Flexible editor with syntax highlighting, autocompletion and call tips
   • Built-in checkers for Python (syntax, issues, style,...)
   • Built-in documentation viewer (and web browser)
   • Interface to Mercurial and Subversion
   • A highly configurable interface

For a more comprehensive point-form list, see Feature Summary.

Like Python and Qt, Eric is cross-platform, installable in Windows, Linux or MacOS.

Eric includes a plug-in system, which supports easy extension of the IDE’s functionality with downloadable plug-ins.

The current stable version is eric6 based on PyQt5, Qt5 and Python 3. Eric is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 of 29 June 2007. Other components are licensed differently – see Licensing.