CodeSkulptor3 vs Eric

CodeSkulptor3 is a browser-based Python interpreter created for teaching Python, especially to beginners. The interface includes an editor and a console that displays printed output and error messages. It implements a subset of Python 3 and adds the SimpleGui, SimpleMap, and SimplePlot graphical libraries. The tool is featured in Coursera’s “Fundamentals of Computing” course, and the maker credits Scott Rixner with building it. Users can save programs to cloud storage under a URL or download saved programs to a computer. Anyone with a saved program’s URL can access its associated file. Collaborative editing sessions can be created or joined, but they are temporary and deleted in about a day. Modern Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari are listed as supported browsers. The documented Python subset excludes constructs including try-except and with statements. Programs can load external files only over HTTPS. The maker says users are anonymous and personal information is not collected. Saved files are stored indefinitely and used to provide the service and anonymous educational research.

Eric is a Python editor and IDE based on Qt and Scintilla, intended for quick edits as well as project management. Its current stable version, eric7, is based on PyQt6, Qt6 and Python 3. Editing tools include syntax highlighting, autocompletion, calltips, source folding, brace matching, error highlighting and project-wide search and replace. For development, it includes a Python debugger with multi-thread and multiprocessing support, profiling, code coverage, code checking, task management and unittest support. Core plugins provide interfaces for Mercurial, Subversion and Git repositories, and users can load further extensions from its Plugin Repository. Python tools include pip and virtual environment management and an interactive shell; rope refactoring is available as an optional plugin. Eric also lists chat and a shared editor as cooperation functions. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and can be installed through PyPI or a distribution archive. The maker recommends installation in a Python virtual environment, and directs Windows users to a ZIP archive. It is free, with no price or usage limits stated.