
Best Python IDEs and Code Editors - MiloszG
https://stxnext.com/blog/2020/01/29/best-python-ides-code-editors/
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metalliqaz
The list they assembled doesn't seem to follow their own data.

Notepad++ was very popular at Stackoverflow, but isn't even mentioned in their
list, while emacs didn't show up in the data but gets a mention.

I use Notepad++ on Windows because it's fast and open source. I use it in
conjunction with FileLocator Pro to search projects.

I tried PyCharm but I just couldn't deal with all the extra crap all over
everything.

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eigenvalue
My vote is for Spyder. It gives you everything you need in a very convenient,
Python-centric way. The ability to see and inspect variables (especially
lists, dicts, and pandas dataframes) in a grid view is a huge productivity
win. I wish they would make the line profiler the default and also have built
in support for Jupiter notebooks (these are available through plugins but it’s
buggy and bad). Also stability took a big step back in the new version 4. But
whenever I try anything else I quickly come back to Spyder.

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vsskanth
I love Spyder but I could never get it to play well with virtual environments
and a non-anaconda python installation. I wonder if that has improved

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snowAbstraction
The reviews for vim and emacs miss that you can use the LSP (Language Server
Protocol) to get some (or a lot) the code navigation and refactoring support
you'd find in VSCode or PyCharm.

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L0stLink
In that regard I have been working on a light-weight, extensible vim
distribution[0] that makes for a great python IDE.

[0] [https://github.com/L0stLink/anvil](https://github.com/L0stLink/anvil)

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acidburnNSA
I know it's supposedly shameful, but I really like Eclipse as a Python IDE. I
am pretty good with vim but still prefer Eclipse when I'm navigating huge
projects across dozens of separate projects and submodules. I know about
ctrl-p and NERDTree but ctrl-shift-r in eclipse is just better for me. I also
find the pydev debugger to be awesome. I launch it from unit tests to find all
my problems.

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LessDmesg
I never could get Eclipse to work. To me, it was always a memory and CPU hog
spending way too much time doing the simplest things. I do install it once in
several years to find out if they fixed performance yet, but to no avail.

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acidburnNSA
Sounds like a pain. I never had problems like this even on underpowered dev
machines.

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yardshop
Not included in this article, but ActiveState just recently released Komode
IDE 12 for free, with the condition that you sign up for their ActiveState
online platform. I've been trying it out for the past few days but haven't
done anything serious in it yet. I'm mainly a SublimeText user and have a
fairly customized environment there, so getting familiar with something else
that has its own practices and quirks takes a little while.

In any case the program seems pretty powerful and supports lots of languages
and development workflows. It's based on Mozilla Firefox somehow and it looks
like lots of features are implemented in JavaScript and Python under the hood.

I probably wouldn't switch to it out right, but am interested in it as another
tool to use here and there.

Interested to hear if anyone else has experience and anything to say about it.

[https://www.activestate.com/products/komodo-
ide/](https://www.activestate.com/products/komodo-ide/)

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tsumnia
The article only glosses over Sublime. Even at shareware, the only thing it
does is a single pop up asking for purchase every 25 saves.

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castillar76
I was a Sublime Text user for a long time, and still use it for a lot of quick
one-off stuff (basically if the Python script will go in one file, I'll write
it in ST). Managing larger projects with modules and larger footprints got
more difficult in ST, so I tried PyCharm and found it nice but really
resource-intensive: slow to start, slow to get things done. VSCode has been a
good middle ground: it's got the IDE features of PyCharm but the faster
startup and small(er) resource footprint to be closer to Sublime.

One of my fellow teachers this term pointed out Wing
([https://wingware.com/](https://wingware.com/)), which I haven't tried but
was developed specifically as a Python IDE. It looks promising!

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thrower123
My long-time favorite for Python has been Geany. Especially these days, it
feels very lightweight and responsive, but it has a pretty decent plugin
ecosystem.

[https://www.geany.org/](https://www.geany.org/)

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randomcomments
Somehow Eric, one of the oldest Python editors not listed [https://eric-
ide.python-projects.org/](https://eric-ide.python-projects.org/)

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mikece
Is this list only for cross-platform IDEs and editors? Because Visual Studio
community edition with VS tools for Python is a very powerful (and zero cost)
option if you're on Windows.

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Stubb
VSC is cross platform and runs happily on MacOS, Linux, and Windows. It's
remote development capabilities let me run it on a MacOS laptop and develop
code on a Linux server. It's replaced every other IDE for me since plug-ins
let me do Python, C/C++, Fortran, CMake, Java, etc. equally well.

Edit: Visual Studio Code

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rovr138
Visual Studio Community does not run on Linux.

Visual Studio Code does though.

~~~
thrower123
Microsoft naming sucks so, so very much. There's so many instances of
tangentially-related products that get lumped under a brand name and unless
one is intimately aware of these evolutions it causes a huge amount of
needless confusion.

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milliams
I'm disinclined to trust what they write as their section titled "Jupyter
Notebook" is actually talking about "JupyterLab". They claim it's created by
"Jupyter Labs" who don't exist so they're clearly just confused.

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sunstone
Geany works very well for me.

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cosmosa
pycharm -- 'nuff said

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ipunchghosts
Wing!!!

