Eric (software)


eric is a free integrated development environment 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.
eric can be downloaded at Sourceforge and installed manually with a python installer script.
Most major GNU/Linux distributions include eric in their software repositories, so when using such GNU/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:
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 Those two separate development lanes are no longer maintained, and the last versions prior to merging them both to 5.5.0 were versions 4.5.25 and 5.4.7.

Gallery

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 and minor releases are listed; revision releases are omitted.
BranchVersionRelease dateMajor changes
42007-06-03
42008-02-03
  • Added plug-in system
  • Added support for Django and TurboGears
42008-08-09
  • Added a toolbar manager
    • 42009-02-08
  • Changed license to GPL "v3 or later"
    • 42010-01-09
  • Changed the help viewer to a full blown web browser
    • 42012-02-04
  • Added Mac OS X to the officially supported platforms
    • 52010-07-04
  • The eric 5 branch represents the new Python 3 variant of eric. It is not supporting Python 2. For Python 2 support the development of the eric 4 branch is continued.
    • 52011-02-27
    52012-02-18
  • Added Mac OS X to the officially supported platforms
    • 52013-02-03
  • Added support for Qt5
    • 52014-01-07
  • Added support for PyQt5 projects
    • 52014-10-27
  • Added Python 2 support to the eric 5 branch, so that from now on both, Python 3 and Python 2, are supported by one single version of eric, making the eric 4 branch for Python 2 obsolete, which is not further continued
    • 62014-12-28
  • eric 6 replaces the eric 5.5.x line of development. It is usable with any combination of Python 2 or Python 3, Qt5 or Qt4 and PyQt5 or PyQt4, on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms
    • 62015-12-05
  • Added multithreading support for checkers to make use of multiple CPUs/CPU-Cores
    • 162016-11-12
  • Switching the release scheme
    • 162016-12-03-
    172017-01-01-
    172017-02-04-
    172017-03-03-
    172017-04-07
  • Minimum required Python versions increased: Python 2 - 2.7.10; Python 3 - 3.4.0
    • 172017-05-06-
    172017-06-03-
    172017-07-02-
    172017-08-03-
    172017-09-01-
    172017-10-07-
    172017-11-03-
    172017-12-02-
    182018-01-06-
    182018-02-03
  • Added support for attributes introduced with Qt 5.9 and Qt 5.10
  • New session file format
    • 182018-03-04-
    182018-04-02-
    182018-05-01-
    182018-06-02-
    182018-07-07-
    182018-08-02-
    182018-09-02-
    182018-10-03-
    182018-11-01-
    182018-12-01-
    192019-01-10-
    192019-02-02-
    192019-03-02-
    192019-04-06-
    192019-05-04-
    192019-06-02-
    192019-07-07-
    192019-08-03-
    192019-09-07-
    192019-10-03-
    192019-11-01-
    192019-12-07-
    202020-01-01-
    202020-02-02-

    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, and IDLE, the standard python IDE shipped with most distributions.