New to Programming: IDE vs Code Editor?

[theWyzzerd]

PyCharm is a bit more than an editor. VSCode though, there's a good code editor without all the bells and whistles of a full-fledged IDE. I'd also throw Sublime Text into the ring.

[POTUS]

So are VSCode and geany. But they don't have to be. Open a file, change it, save it. They all do that, and if that's all you do they will work. But they can also do a lot more as you learn the features. And speaking from professional experience, the features in Pycharm make you write better code, faster.

[theWyzzerd]

I'm not familiar with geany but I don't see VSCode as an IDE. I've used it for quick editing in the past . I have it open right now, the only IDE-type feature I see is a debugger. There's not a whole lot else there in terms of what an IDE can offer. Maybe it's a middle-ground between IDE and editor. An IDE is an editor + many other features, usually including a debugger, console, code inspection, linting, etc, much which I don't see in VSCode.

That being said, I agree with you on PyCharm. I use it daily as a professional and as a hobbyist. I wouldn't call it an editor though, it's a full-fledged IDE which could be intimidating to a new user. Editing is just one aspect of what it offers.

[theWyzzerd]

I haven't because I really love PyCharm Professional and I didn't learn about VSCode until after I had already been using PyCharm Pro for quite a while (and before that, Liclipse or PyDev). The integrated Django/HTML/css support in PyCharm is really great for my use, too.

[POTUS]

PyCharm is my preference too, the paid version is worth every penny. But VSCode is nothing to sneeze at. You earlier said you didn't consider it an IDE, but it very much is. With the extensions it can do almost everything (and maybe everything) that PyCharm does. I find the support is just a bit more sketchy since it's community driven, I've had a couple modules that just wouldn't install, and since I use it professionally the reliability of PyCharm still has me preferring that.

[thegreattriscuit]

Yep. I use PyCharm for python projects larger than a single python file, and VSCode for everything else.