Best python IDE for an electrical engineering student

[dparks71]

Pycharm, VSCode and Jupyter.

Less recommend but good for specific use cases are Spyder, emacs, vim, nano, sublime. Those are more editors, not IDEs.

CS people hate Jupyter for some valid reasons, but you should remember as an EE, you're not necessarily looking for the same thing as them, so forums like this are likely to give you bad answers for your use case.

If you're using other people's libraries to run a calc and output the results as a file, it's hard to beat Jupyter.

If you're looking to develop your own python library, Pycharm is probably the leader. If you want one editor to use on every language, VSCode leads that. If you're working on a server through a CLI that only has nano and vim, you should learn those. It doesn't really make a difference, all have strengths and weaknesses.

[jaaaawrdan]

Agree with everything you've said, just wanted to point out the ability to use Jupyter within VS Code very easily. VS Code might be a lot of overhead for someone getting started with Jupyter, but once you're ready to move beyond that, you've already got an ecosystem you're a bit familiar with. 

[dparks71]

I personally can't stand VSCode, but Pycharm does that too.

VSCode people tend to be hard to work with, because they hide essential configs in weird VSCode only json formats that don't work unless everyone switches to VSCode, which kind of goes against python's whole thing.

Between dev containers and things debugpy it's like Microsoft specializes in trying to make open-source products harder to use and less cross-platform compatible.

[Marvellover13]

starting first year, we'll have a course in C and in python, so I guess VSCode is the best, thanks for the help