Blender addon: Script Watcher
This is something that has bothered me every time I tried some Python scripting in Blender: if you use an external editor, your changes won’t be automatically loaded. Script Watcher fixes that.
Isaac Weaver writes:
Hi, I just posted this on blender artists but thought I’d tell you about it too. It’s an addon I developed to assists in the development of other script, specifically if you’re using an external editor.
Basically, it watches the script you’re developing for changes, whenever a change occurs it re-runs the script in blender. This allows you to save your file and instantly see blender update with the new version of the script.
Put it in trunk! ;)
That is insanely good ! (and clever)
Thanks a lot ! :)
Thanks! I’m glad you like it ;)
As Obi-Wan said: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…”
I think you meant to thank Isaac there. But I agree with ya. ;)
Excuse me the question, no offence intended, but what’s the point of developing blender python script outside blender, when you can run it, test it or debug it only inside blender (because you most likely import bpy which is not available from outside blender)? Well, I guess you can have Blender compiled as python module, is that the case?
I’ve grown used to my own text editor, so it is much easier to code in that than inside blender. That’s all :)
As a python project get’s bigger and begins to span multiple files, it is very difficult to manage inside of blender. But with this addon you can layout your project the same way you would with any other python project, and things just work out the way they should ;)
Personally, I’ve lost a lot of development time because I accidentally reload a text block from disk when in fact the most up-to-date version was in the .blend. This can be extremely confusing and frustrating when you get it wrong.
Also, if you haven’t tried it yet, I strongly encourage you to try out PyCharm. It’s an IDE for python, and it’s just AMAZING! Blender’s text editor is fine for really small stuff, but when the project/task gets bigger, it helps a LOT to have the basic error checking and text-completion that PyCharm has. It’s a bit tricky to setup at first, to get it to where it recognizes imports like bpy and mathutils, but once you get past that it’s freakin sweet!
Since no option is perfect and one-size-fits-all, it helps to have additional options (optionally available, of course) that help do better what some other option doesn’t. ;)
Related: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/31126/workflow-for-developing-add-on-script/