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Are there any alternatives (IDE or other workflow) to Wolfram Workbench for development and debugging?

Elaboration: An open source alternative.

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See this page... is that what you were looking for? – rm -rf♦ May 5 '12 at 17:12
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@R.M That IS the Wolfram Workbench, sold as a plugin instead of a stand-alone app. That's not my definition of an alternative :) – EmpireJones May 5 '12 at 17:14
I know, I explicitly said that ;) I meant alternative in the sense that you could've used an existing product (eclipse) with a plugin... – rm -rf♦ May 5 '12 at 17:17
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@EmpireJones, perhaps you could elaborate a bit on what it is that you are not satisfied with in WB such that answers in that direction can be given. – ruebenko May 5 '12 at 17:27
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I prefer to use the simple installation of Mathematica to write my Applications. Don't know if this will work in future versions of MMA, but for now it works in MMA8: ApplicationMaker – jmlopez May 18 '12 at 18:32
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5 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

There are indeed some open source alternatives, as other posters have suggested, but you will miss the unique facilities of WB to develop state of the art documentation. So if you want to develop some serious work in MMA, for yourself or others, you should seriously consider WB. Having said that, I use WB in a (probably) unconventional way. Within WB you can select which editor you want to use for the various file types. The default being: editing the .m file with the internal WB editor. Well, I instead chose to edit the .nb (package) file using the standard front end (linked to WB), this action will automatically update the .m file and then use all the standard WB facilities to integrate documentation. In this way you have the all the cool front-end editing tools plus all the cool WB documentation and debugging tools at your disposal.

This technique is described in more detail in my answer in Managing formatted usage messages in Wolfram Workbench

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I appreciate the info, thanks! – EmpireJones May 6 '12 at 18:28
up vote 2 down vote

There is an interactive emacs mode and also this is nice for developing (I don't use either much anymore though so don't know how current they are).

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up vote 3 down vote

How about TeXmacs? There is a plugin available for this open-source replacement for the Mathematica front-end that connects to a Mathematica kernel over MathLink.

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While the mathematica plug-in seems to be supplied with TeXmacs (at least in the OS X version), how does one: (1) get it to appear on the TeXmacs Insert > Session menu? (2) otherwise interact with Mathematica? – murray May 26 '12 at 19:56
@murray I'm not familiar with OS X. Try asking your question in the TeXmacs users forum. – StackExchanger May 27 '12 at 8:15
up vote 8 down vote

The is also a TextMate bundle for Mathematica:

https://github.com/dehowell/mathematica-tmbundle

TextMate is for Mac only, but this bundle should work in other editors like Sublime Text (multi platform), e-Text Editor (windows)

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up vote 4 down vote

You can also use the Eclipse IDE which can be found at:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

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Isn't Workbench and Eclipse basically the same thing? I always had the impression that Workbench is Eclipse based. – Markus Roellig May 5 '12 at 17:41
@MarkusRoellig Yes it is. As R.M pointed out above, you can as well get the Wolfram Workbench plugin for the standard Eclipse version (which works better for me under Linux btw). – sebhofer May 5 '12 at 20:17
@sebhofer what problems did you have with workbench and Linux? Workbench crashing suddenly? I have this problem currently and would be interested to know if switching to eclipse + plugin would help. – su1 Mar 28 at 16:44
@su1 I always had problems with random java errors popping up. For me this definitely improved with newer eclipse versions. Still crashes sometimes though. – sebhofer Mar 28 at 19:45
@sebhofer ok I'm still having problems with workbench 2.0 on linux mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/22268/… so will try eclipse + plugin soon – su1 Mar 29 at 9:10

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