Cleanest way to run/debug python programs in windows

You can easily widen the Windows console by doing the following:

• click the icon for the console window in the upper right
• select Properties from the menu
• click the Layout tab
• change the Window Size > Width to 140

This can also be saved universally by changing the Defaults on the menu.

Year 2017-2022 Answer:

Try Visual Studio Code, it has great support for Python debugging, auto completion and more!

See this link for details: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/python#_debugging

For an interactive interpreter, nothing beats IPython. It's superb. It's also free and open source. On Windows, you'll want to install the readline library. Instructions for that are on the IPython installation documentation.

Winpdb is my Python debugger of choice. It's free, open source, and cross platform (using wxWidgets for the GUI). I wrote a tutorial on how to use Winpdb to help get people started on using graphical debuggers.