People who liked Rstudio also liked [this Python IDE]

By default, IDLE just shows you the interactive session (which is why it only takes one statement at a time). The New File option will give you an editor window alongside the interactive session. There you can put in your multi-statement script, and F5 will run it.

I did that with IDLE today! (Am newish to Python but not to programming.) Just press F5 to run the file you're editing in the console window (ctrl-N brings up a new file editor if you want to start a brand new file). I'm sure it's possible to outgrow it, but it should be fine to get you started messing around with the language.

Huh. IPython notebook is not what I thought I was looking for, but it does seem to have the level of simplicity I want, plus good design for tracing back what I've done as a individual learner (as opposed to file management for projects, which I think of as pretty different requirements). Plus figuring out how to install and launch it did not involve parsing through a dozen+ different options. And, most importantly, there is a pulldown that says "user interface tour." Thank you, god. And Metafilter. I'll still take recommendations for IDEs, but this is now sufficiently solved that I can get back to my actual work of solving this week's bioinformatics algorithms homework.

PyCharm is freakin' awesome, and I do constantly use the console for testing out snippets, but probably overkill for what you're trying to do. If ever you need a full fledged IDE, though, definitely give it a try.

Honestly, I usually just use a text editor like TextMate or Sublime Text plus a terminal window with an ipython session. If an IDE is something you're set on, I've used Ninja and PyDev, and both were ok and should meet your "just work" requirement, although they didn't leave a big impression on me. I had trouble with Eric lagging even on relatively small source files. I spent a lot of time with Enthought's https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/, which should work out of the box and also has a decent package manager. I liked it, but I've only used the academic license version and not the free version.

I guess I should clarify that with Python, if really all you want is "edit and run" with no other bells and whistles, nearly any IDE should be able to just do that without too much/any fiddling, and there isn't a lot of additional value in having an IDE vs an editor and a terminal. (You'll also get a fair number of people who think using an IDE is cheating or going to hamstring your coding or whatever, which I accidentally succumbed to a bit -- sorry.) Are there additional IDE-specific things you want? Like tab-completion of function names and so forth? Which ones have you tried and found the learning curve too steep? That could help narrow it down.

So, my attempts to use IDLE have been thwarted by the fact that apparently it only can run one statement at a time (if I understand the error it's throwing correctly), and I don't want to have to paste each line in, execute it, and paste another, execute it, etc. Rstudio would just run the file in the editor until it hit an error. If that's doable in IDLE, I'm completely missing the boat on how to make that happen. But again: very new at this.

The http://ipython.org/install.html notebook interface is also nice and probably close to what you want, but not exactly. It's a Mathematica-style notebook interface, so you have a textbox for code, followed by the results of that code (possibly something graphical), followed by another textbox, etc. It's very simple to use; http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/keflavich/4042018 of what it might look like. If you have a script you want to run you can just paste the whole thing into a single box, or break it up to look at the intermediate outputs. It runs in the browser but locally on your machine, so no internet connection required.

You are looking for https://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/. See also https://pythonhosted.org/spyder/.