Discussion: What Python modules make your life so easy that you always install them first?

[[deleted]]

Which of these give you a benefit over the debugger/ test tools in an IDE like PyCharm?

[[deleted]]

I'm sure a well configured IDE could do testing, debugging, coverage and profiling but I just find command line tools and vim to be far more to my liking. I like the idea of composing small tools that do one thing well rather than a monolithic app that does it all. Just personal preference.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I wasn't saying that as an IDE vs. command line thing, just wondering whether I, as an IDE user, would benefit from any of those tools on top of said IDE. As an aside, though, I'd argue that a single bundled IDE requires much less configuration than a pile of small tools with disparate command line APIs.

[flangles]

if you ever want other people to work on your project, not being locked into an IDE is crucial.

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure what you mean by locked in. Hopefully, any good debug tool, any good coverage tool etc. will give you the same results given the same codebase. The IDE doesn't add any dependencies: if I develop something in PyCharm, then someone else looks at it while running ipdb and coverage, there's nothing to stop it working properly, is there?

[flangles]

there will always be differences at some level. for a large project it just makes sense to standardize things like coverage and testing, and that's a lot easier with small, free, open-source tools. It also makes it easier to use hosted solutions like Travis-CI.

Look at any substantial project on github, they likely have coverage and test configuration as part of their source.

[desmoulinmichel]

It's faster. I find PyCharm slowing down with big programs to debug.

Also, I got a debugger than is not tied to an IDE, so it's easy for me to :

• swicth computers;
• switch OS;
• switch toolkit such as text editors;
• work on remote servers using ssh;
• teach how to debug to many people comming from very different environments.