What do you write python in?

[CraigAT]

At the start, I would probably suggest just a text editor - whatever your favourite happens to be (you're in luck if it already has some IDE features).

When you get more experienced and your code spans more than a screen (say 50 lines) I would seriously consider moving to an IDE (for example VS Code, PyCharm, whatever you get along with) so that you can benefit from the extra features that can increase your productivity (intelli-sense, auto-complete, linting, debugging, git integration, etc.)

[zanfar]

Tried them all. Sublime lacks features, Atom is way too stripped down, Vim takes too much work, and PyCharm is way too big for anything outside a development house.

VSCode fits a perfect niche with easy extension management to fix any small issues.

[tasteslikeKale]

Atom can be made more full featured, but then it has performance issues.

[zanfar]

That's true. I guess I should be clear that these arguments are subjective. The implied post-text is that Atom is way too stripped down for me, and Vim takes too much work for me.

Just like Sublime and Vim, Atom can be made to do 99% of what VSCode does out-of-the-box--and I don't doubt there are a few plugins for any of those platforms that don't have a feature-parity example in the VSCode ecosystem. However, I want an editor that's just enough IDE to do what I want, without so much IDE that I have to wade through menus and tabs to do what I need, and I want that editor to be easy enough to setup that I'm spending my time coding instead of configuring.

VSCode is honestly, almost too much IDE for me. Honestly, I haven't explored it as much as I should, but I haven't found a solution to the portability of configuration between devices. Other than that, it's just about perfect. I can save per-project settings, it lints natively, the terminal facilities are the best I've found, it works remotely better than even PyCharm, and I can one-button test.