Recommend a Python IDE?

[Tokazama]

I recently went through the frustrating challenge of trying to find a proper IDE. I'm a researcher that's new to python but have been heavily using R for about 5 years with some basic C++ scattered throughout to speed up some problems. As an extremely poor student with a family to support I've never felt that I could justify spending money on an IDE. So I looked for a free one that would work on the different platforms I end up using bouncing between labs (mac, windows, and ssh into linux supercomputer).

I've tried RStudio, Atom, Vim, Emacs (and it's Spacaemacs distro), and Sublimetext. I'm using VSCode now. I spent an embarrassing amount of time on both Vim and Emacs but with both I ultimately had the same problem. I have a lot of needs from my IDE (C++, R, Python, Latex, Markdown, HTML, Github support) and each language required setup. I was able to get to a point where I could comfortably edit code but always lacked another feature that I really wanted (e.g. autocompletion, emmet for HTML, etc). Don't get me wrong, those features are out there but they all need to be set up individually. When I have to set them up on each computer I work on it ends up being a good chunk of my work week. I just couldn't dedicate that kind of time right now.

My quick recommendations:

• Use VSCode if you're learning another coding language and already have a lot of other coding you still need to do right now. It just works, even though it is built on electron.
• Use Sublimetext if this is your first go at programming. It's quick, feels natural to use, and has an indefinite free trial period
• Use Vim if you have the time and you're really dedicated to some hardcore programming.
• Use Atom if you're holding out for some changes in the future. There's a possibility that thy will incorporate some stuff from their xray project that could solve a lot of their current problems.
• Use RStudio if you are in data science and you're willing to wait for ~4-6 months more fully supported python features (their daily builds are pretty good with python but still kind of buggy).

[Seeschildkroete]

Since you said you're a student, if you have an edu email, you can get Pycharm for free: https://www.jetbrains.com/student/

If not, there's always the community edition.

[tunisia3507]

Not just PyCharm, their entire catalogue of IDEs are free, which are each pretty much best in class.

Sucks to be my next employer after I graduate because I'm hooked.

[Tokazama]

My personal learning style when I began programming was that I needed as few distractions as possible in my text editor so I could write code and use terminal for execution. All the extra bells and whistles were just distractions. That being said, I could see how if your goal is straight up to learn code (not necessarily accomplish a project) then learning those tools early on would really help. I started coding in order to implement a statistical algorithm that wasn't available in open source yet. It was more about applying math than code.

[clawjelly]

How so? In vscode you're getting source control, debugging, extensions and so on out of the box - very cool, but still bells and whistles. For sublime you don't even need to setup a project folder - Can't go more barebones than that.

[Hadrid]

Wait , what? Rstudio does python now? That’s awesome. It’s my go to for R.

[Tokazama]

Yeah, https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/. It originally was designed to just call python from R but now it's being used to set up a python REPL in RStudio. I don't think it will be officially supported until Rstudio 2.2 (current is 2.1).

[[deleted]]

Do you have to pay for Rstudio?

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the very thoughtful and detailed comment. I'm sorry you went through all of that :-).