Thonny is a Python Tk-based IDE designed for novice programmers. It provides a beginner-friendly development environment suitable for novice programming students, while also offering many of the features and options needed from a modern IDE.
Thonny supports different ways of stepping through the code, step-by-step expression evaluation, detailed visualization of the call stack and a mode for explaining the concepts of references and heap.
While many coders will have cut their teeth using IDLE, Thonny is my recommended Python IDE for beginners. Although Thonny can be used as a general purpose lightweight IDE similar to IDLE, it was created to be used for the purposes of teaching and learning introductory programming.
The software is designed and developed by Aivar Annamaa at the University of Tartu.
Features include:
- Statement stepping without breakpoints.
- Live variables during debugging.
- Stepping through evaluation of the expressions (expressions get replaced by their values).
- Separate windows for executing function calls (for explaining local variables and call stack).
- Variables and memory can be explained either by using simplified model (name → value) or by using more realistic model (name → address/id → value).
- Faithful representation of function calls.
- Highlights syntax errors in code such as unclosed quotes and parentheses.
- Code commenting.
- Code completion – explore APIs with the help of code completion.
- Simple debugger.
- Support for stepping back in time during debugging.
- Support for display scaling / high-DPI screens.
- Simple pip GUI.
- Possibility to log user actions for replaying or analyzing the programming process.
- User Interface Themes – Clean Dark, Clean Dark Blue, Clean Dark Green, Clean Sepia, and Enhanced Clam.
- Syntax themes – Default Dark, Default Dark Blue, Default Dark Green, Default Light, Desert Sunset, IDLE Classic, Tomorrow, Tomorrow Night, Tomorrow Night Blue, Tomorrow Night Bright, Tomorrow Night Eighties, and Zenburn.
- Infrastructure for extensions.
- Cross-platform support – Windows, Linux and MacOS versions are available.
Website: thonny.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository, Blog, Mailing List
Developer: Aivar Annamaa and contributors
License: MIT License
Thonny is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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