A few years ago, during some work downtime, I started work on EVE. The original reason for creating it is that Houdini’s default VEX editor has very limited autocomplete, which gives you a list of available functions, but no information about their signature, which means you often have to look up the exact order of parameters for functions you don’t use every day. From experience especially coding iPhone apps in XCode during my student years I knew that much more comfortable interfaces exist.

EVE instead provides full function signatures, generated directly from the Houdini help, and also fills those in when choosing a completion.

The completer in action.

From that, it has grown to provide extra features such as typing “through” closing brackets, better auto-indentation, colored (rainbow) brackets, and so on. Since it’s unfortunately impossible to add custom widgets to Houdini’s parameter editor, it also ended up as a fairly complete re-implementation of the parameter editor itself.

How to get it

There is more information, a demo video etc on the EVE Website.

Future Plans

EVE is currently in a closed beta, but I intend to eventually make it available for a reasonable price once I consider it stable.

Technology

Written mainly in Python and Qt/PySide.

This has started as a Python&nbsp.2 and PySide2 project, but over time was updated to use Python 3 and be compatible with Qt 6 as well.