my $.03 I'm a tool freak - not just development, in general. Also from a Java background.
PyDev plugin on Eclipse is the bomb, as far as I am concerned. There was also a TruStudio plugin for eclipse that was a bit more ambitious, but I've used it since early milestones through to the current release, and there are still bugs in the way it handles indents and code identification. So I have settled on PyDev. It does a good bit of the work for you. It's package management is the best - basically it uses java based ideas. IT's not a perfect fit, but it's good enough for government work ;) Basically I use PyDev for 1) syntax highlighting 2) code completion 3) minor debugging - debugger seems a little clunky to me 4) subversion integration - I love this feature, don't know how I got along without it (via standard eclipse svn plugin) - also available for cvs And it works well and performance is good. Code complete doesn't bog the system to bad. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
