I want to familiarise myself with the Calibre source in order to see if I can implement a few snippets to scratch an itch (word count). A longer term goal is to try my luck on larger problems like annotations for Sony.
To start with I'd prefer something free as in beer, I have no idea if I'll use it enough to warrant buying a licence. Cross-platform would be best, but I have Windows and Linux available otherwise.
I'm not a developer by trade, but I do have a CS background, and am reasonably familiar with various languages, for instance perl and php in addition to Java and C++. Very little Python as of yet, though
I guess that I can do what I want by modifying the python files only. I've worked on a large Java project, and Eclipse worked very well for that. I liked the intelligent code functionality, and its ability to "understand" the whole project, not just individual files. Pydev seems to be a bit lacking in this respect.
Wing IDE Personal seems nice, but I don't really want to pay for it before I've gotten my feet wet.
I'm trying my way through a few free ones now, but any suggestions from more experienced developers would be welcome