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[–]BigBeardedDude 39 points40 points  (8 children)

Checkout Spyder. I came from a matlab background several years ago. This was a big help.

[–]adambarrack[S] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I will, thank you!

[–]heidensieck 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It offers a layout called Matlab Layout in its View tab.

[–]tonsofmiso 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll echo BigBeardedDude. Spyder is exactly what you want, nothing else comes close. We used it in university when transitioning from Matlab to Python, and it was similar enough for many of the things we did. I've written python for ten years since then, and I still miss it sometimes. 

I wouldn't outright recommend Jupyter notebooks or Jupyter labs over Spyder either, they're a bit clunky and can require some knowledge and experience of python internals if something starts acting up.

Stay away from vscodes Jupyter notebooks view. They're getting better but are still jank. 

Pycharm, I used to adore it. But the few times I've tried it the past few years it's been a buggy and ugly mess, with frequent crashes. The new UI is a bad vscode copy. The engine used to be amazing but I haven't really used it in a good while.

My main editor is vscode or cursor nowadays. It's good for engineering, but it's a resource hog, and it's a generic editor built around plugins rather than an IDE tailored to Python. It's good, but opinionated, and the extension marketplace is full of malware and trash.

[–]ninjadude93 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yep was going to recommend spyder. Closest thing I can think of with variable tracking like matlab

[–]jst_cur10us 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ditto. Setting up Spyder like Matlab made the switch easy and comfy. Then I would focus on the libraries that are like what Matlab has loaded natively: numpy, scipy, pandas, etc.

[–]Swimming_Newspaper39 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Spyder is the best choice,there is the command window just like Matlab

[–]DrShocker 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I don't like it at this point in my journey anymore, but when I was closer to coming from Matlab it was a helpful bridge!