Ok, this is going to be controversial . . .

Today I found Geany . . . and my search for the perfect Linux text-editor finally ended. If you’re already a VIM or Emacs ninja then you may want to stop reading now, if however you come from a Windows background (like me) or you like the niceties a true GUI tool can offer, then Geany may be everything you’ve been looking for.

I use Python, so whitespace management is *very* important to me, for this I need some key functionality:

• Whitespace display
• Correct tab/space handling

On Windows my editor of choice was Notepad++, it did all of above superbly. When I moved to Linux most of my development-related tasks became much easier, however I sorely missed some of the key editing  features that I had become used to (as a side note – I also miss the GUI repo browsing offered by the TortoiseHG).

Why I love Geany

It’s fast, lightweight and has some killer features . . .

1. Whitespace

Geany shows whitespace clearly.  It handles tabs and spaces properly without interchanging the two. These features make all Python indentation issues just drift away.

2. Folding

It’s great to be able to collapse all the classes and functions that you’re not working on to save some screen real-estate (not to mention the scrolling up/down).

3. Class/Function browser

This sealed the deal. The browser on the left pane lists all the classes, functions, variables and imports found in the open file. This makes navigation very quick, and is a boon for working your way around an unfamiliar piece of code.

3. Other great stuff

And there’s more: Built-in file browser, shell, scratchpad, and support for 3rd-party plugins are just some of the other great features that Geany has to offer. As a bonus, Geany can also run on Windows too.

So Geany it is, and I’m finally happy. Here are some of the other editors I tried (and why they didn’t quite fit the bill for me).

Gedit
The default editor in Ubuntu is actually a really nice little tool and does 99% of what I need, but something I cannot live without is whitespace display. None of the available Gedit plugins seem to offer this..

VIM
Immensely powerful, but has a learning curve that right now I’m just to busy for.

Emacs
See VIM.

Wing IDE
I had high hope for Wing, but it let me down massively when it started to mix up tabs and spaces within the same indented sections.

Eclipse
I really don’t want to wait 10mins for Eclipse to load every day. It’s far too big for my needs.

I needed to find a way to send email reports from a scheduled cron job. I looked for a simple linux command-line email solution but couldn’t find anything that fitted the bill. I was already using Django’s EmailMessage class in an existing app, so I started to think about how I could re-use it for scheduled jobs.

I’m using linux in this scenario, but it would probably work fine in Windows too.

First I configured my cron job (actually the .sh script that cron job runs) to output to a file called report.txt. This would be overwritten each time the job ran, so would always be the latest version.

An existing Django project settings.py had the following settings to enable email sending via a Gmail (or Google Apps) account. The settings are based on Nathan Ostgard’s Gmail and Django article.

EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'user@domain.com'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'password'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

So I knocked up a standalone python script sendreport.py that would take these settings and email the report.txt file to me.

#!/user/bin/python
#
# Get settings from an existing django project
import sys
import os
sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)), '/..'))
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'my_django_project.settings'

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage

# Set up email fields
recipient = 'myemail@mydomain.com'
subject = 'CRON Job Report'
body = 'CRON Job Report for blah, blah, blah . . .'

# Create email object, attach file, send
email = EmailMessage(subject, body, to = [recipient])
email.attach_file('report.txt')
email.send()

The EmailMessage class makes it very easy to attach a file and send the email.  I can tag this on to the end of the .sh script executed by the cron job and jobs-a-good-un

Well sort of . .  it’s functional, but not ideal. It works by reading email settings from an existing Django app’s setting.py. I wanted it to be more portable, and not dependent on a specific Django configuration/app.

Then I found out that you can specify Django settings from within a standalone python script. Could this method be used to break any dependencies and make the script more portable? Absolutely!

#!/user/bin/python
#
# Configure some standalone django settings
# These settings are for a gmail or google apps account
from django.conf import settings
settings.configure (
EMAIL_HOST = 'smtp.gmail.com'
EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'user@domain.com'
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'password'
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
)

from django.core.mail import EmailMessage
import datetime
import sys
import socket

# Get the hostname and current time to put in the email
hostname = socket.gethostname()
timestamp = datetime.datetime.now().ctime()

# Set up email fields
recipient = 'myemail@mydomain.com'
subject = '%s CRON Job Report: %s' % (hostname, timestamp)
body = 'Report for %s on %s attached' % (hostname, timestamp)

# Create email object, attach file, send
email = EmailMessage(subject, body, to = [recipient])
email.attach_file('bkp_report.txt')
email.send()

I also made use of hostname()and datetime() to provide some more detail for the email subject and body.

Now the only dependency is Django itself – which I’m happy with, my job reports are archived in email – which I like, and I get to use more Python – which is good for me.