What is the best alternative to&#x20;Visual Studio with the Python Tools extension?

Code runner is fantastic for shorter projects, although it can handle very large projects. It stops code completion when the program gets to be several thousands of lines long. See More

8 0

score 21 · Answer 2

CodeRunner

Top Con

Working with very very large projects

Top Pro

Fast and efficient

You can have multiple tabs open with multiple languages in at the same time and Code Runner still performs excellently. Searching through code is always instant and executing code is fast. See More

Top Pro

Supports many different languages

Code Runner comes preinstalled with over 20 languages built in, and it's super easy to run simple programs. See More

Specs

Platforms:Mac

21 1

score 52 · Answer 3

Ninja

Top Pro

Simple set up

Once dependencies like maven are installed it is up and running in minutes with one simple command. See More

Top Con

Little user choice in organization

Since most of the code and folder structure are automatically generated, this leaves little room to the developer on how they will organize their project. See More

Top Pro

Easy horizontal scaling

Ninja is stateless by design. This makes horizontal scaling very easy and just a matter of adding servers. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

52 3

score 27 · Answer 4

Eric Python IDE

Top Pro

Integrated python debugger

Eric has a python debugger built-in. See More

Top Con

Auto completion is not very good

The auto completion is not top-notch compared to other IDEs and text editors. In fact, many people recommend installing a third-party plugin to improve the auto completion found in Eric. See More

Top Pro

Good project management

Top Con

Complex interface

Eric has a very complex UI. It overwhelms you with sections and windows and doesn't let you focus on code. Every tool is displayed on the top bars (there are 3) with no logical grouping or structure whatsoever. See More

Top Pro

Integration with version control software

Integrates with various VCS. See More

Top Pro

Integrated class browser

With Eric you can easily browse all classes in your current Python project and display the methods for a given class. See More

Specs

Multi Language Support:No

27 2

score 3 · Answer 5

Leo Editor

Top Pro

Outlines - better than folding

With outlines functions and classes can be arranged and grouped with their logical neighbours, even nested. Whole branch hierarchies can be expanded and collapsed in a single key stroke, or moved from this spot to that, as best fits the thinking or troubleshooting of the day. Outline trees make navigation across broadly different areas an effortless exercise. See your whole project in a single view, across any number of external files and modules. See More

Top Con

A different way of thinking means learning

There's no other code and text editor quite like Leo, so expect to put in some time learning. It can take some trying this and that before the "Aha!"s start to roll in. It's experiential. See More

Top Pro

Internal command line

All Leo editor commands are available in a command bar, called a "mini-buffer", that feature tab-completion and command history. For example "Find all nodes containing phrase '...', clone them, and paste in a new tree" is a simple alt-x, clone-find-flattened (or cff) away. As is toggle-split-direction, expand/contract-log-pane and execute-script. See More

Top Pro

Clones - when two or three or ... are better than one

Leo's unique concept of 'clones' means you can re-arrange sections of an external file to suit your way of thinking or tacking a specific issue without changing the organization of the source. This makes it a great tool for studying code from others, and perhaps contributing back to them without changing your or their preferred arrangement methods. See More

Specs

License:MIT

Price:FREE

Cross Platform:Linux, Mac, Windows

3 0

score 83 · Answer 6

Kakoune

Top Pro

Will be familiar to vim users

Kakoune first started as a rewrite from scratch of vim, but then ended up being another text editor altogether. So it's inspired in a lot of ways from vim. See More

Top Con

Small community

Top Pro

More modern than vim

Top Con

No real Windows support

Will compile under CygWin. See More

Top Pro

Good UNIX citizen

It follows the UNIX philosophy by doing one thing well (text editing) and interfaces nicely with other CLI tools. See More

Top Con

Default bindings do not play nice with OS X (Alt+???)

Top Pro

Text selection mechanism

Kakoune works on selections, which are oriented, inclusive range of characters, selections have an anchor and a cursor character. Most commands move both of them, except when extending selection where the anchor character stays fixed and the cursor one moves around. See More

Top Con

Written in C++

Top Pro

Very expressive

Kakoune provides a very expressive set of commands, including various objects selection (paragraph, blocks, words), alignment support, conditional selection filtering... This set of command is expressive enough to implement all the provided auto indentation logic. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed and supported

Top Pro

Self-documenting

A helper pops up when typing commands. See More

Top Pro

Simpler and more consistent than Vim

Some keys select, other keys operate on the selections. Shift is used to extend the selection, alt is used for alternative behavior, e.g. reverse the search direction. No inconsistencies like Y which means yy and not y$ in Vim. See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, macOS, Android

License:Unlicense

Wing IDE provides local and remote debugging. See More

83 7

score 45 · Answer 7

Wing Python IDE

Top Pro

Built-in debugger

Top Con

Little support for other languages

If you want to develop JavaScript or TypeScript or use other front-end technologies, support for non-Python languages is minimal. See More

Top Pro

Checks for errors in the source code

Pylint has a static analysis tool integrated which checks the source code for any potential errors and bugs. See More

Top Pro

Exceptionally responsive support

Top Pro

Totally worth the price -- it's a steal, in fact

Top Pro

Advanced debugging features (multi-process, remote, recursive)

Top Pro

Totally programmable keystroke shortcuts

Top Pro

Debugging in threads

Top Pro

Customizable plug-ins if desired

Top Pro

VI and Emacs editor modes

Top Pro

Super-flexible macro capabilities

Specs

Platforms:Linux, Windows, macOS

License:Commercial (with paid and free editions)

Price:US $69-179 annual or US $95-245 perpetual (and 2 free options)

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi

PyScripter is a lightweight Python IDE. See More

45 5

score 36 · Answer 8

PyScripter

Top Pro

Lightweight

Top Con

Windows only

Available for Windows only. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Covers the needs of advanced users (thread debugging, unit testing etc.). See More

Top Con

Noticeably unstable since v.4

Frequently hangs/freezes, esp. when debugging. See More

Top Pro

Superb for interactively developing scripts

When you run a program, the context is automatically available in the Python interpreter afterwards, without having to set breakpoints. See More

Top Con

Refactoring is not that easy

In Pyscripter, refactoring pretty much leans on traditional dumb find-and-replace. See More

Top Pro

Easy to set up

No configurations needed. Just download and code. See More

Specs

At the heart of Spacemacs, the configuration layers group packages configuration into semantic units that can be toggled on and off. The architecture is simple but powerful allowing to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages. Layers for other languages can be found here. See More

36 5

score 63 · Answer 9

Spacemacs with Python layer

Top Pro

Support for different languages with layers

Top Con

Configured in Emacs Lisp

Most developers don't know Lisp all that well, and of those, the subset that knows elisp is even smaller. Thankfully, it's not that difficult to get a basic Spacemacs configuration together without knowing elisp (thanks to Spacemacs's spectacular documentation), but if you need to alter, fix, or customize a plugin/layer in non-trivial ways, this can become a major hindrance. See More

Top Pro

Easy to remember keybindings

Key bindings are organized in mnemonic namespaces. For instance buffer actions are under b, file actions under f, project actions under p, search actions under s etc... Key bindings are consistent across the whole distribution thanks to a set of conventions. See More

Top Con

Not an IDE

For users that aren't familiar with Vim or Emacs, Spacemacs will have a steep learning curve since everything is based on keyboard shortcuts and IDE-based users (or even users coming from editors like SublimeText or Atom) may have trouble finding things and adjusting to a new editing style. See More

Top Pro

Great support from the community

The community is very active and there is a welcoming gitter chat to ask for questions. See More

Top Con

Slow startup time

Although configuration is heavily lazy loaded, the starting time of Spacemacs is usually between two and five seconds. Emacs can be run as a daemon though which reduces the clients startup time to a few milliseconds. See More

Top Pro

Free/Libre/Open

Top Pro

It includes org-mode

Top Pro

Easy to manage configuration dependencies

At the heart of Spacemacs, the configuration layers group packages configuration into semantic units that can be toggled on and off. The architecture is simple but powerful allowing to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages. See More

Top Pro

Gradual learning curve

Evil package is a first class citizen, Spacemacs embraces it from day one. Evil package allows Vim users to be productive very quickly while still allowing regular Emacs users to use Spacemacs. See More

Top Pro

Above average documentation quality

Documentation is mandatory for each new configuration layer and can be accessed directly within the editor in Org format. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Unix, Mac

License:GPLv3

Cross Platform:Yes

Because the editor is a web app (the Jupyter Notebook program is a web server that you run on the host machine), it is possible to use this on quite literally any machine. Morever, you can have Jupyter Notebook run on one machine (like a VM that you have provisioned in the cloud) and access the web page / do your editing from a different machine (like a Chromebook). See More

63 8

score 28 · Answer 10

Jupyter

Top Pro

Web-based development allows for usage literally anywhere

Top Con

Notebook-style makes reusing functions annoying

Top Pro

Interactive

Most IDEs require you to separately run Python to see the output of a particular piece of code. By contrast, Jupyter Notebook can evaluate Python statements inline, giving you the immediate feedback of interactive use of the interpreter while keeping your changes saved. See More

Top Con

Interactive usage takes some getting used to

While the interactiveness is extremely, extremely powerful and useful, it does take a little bit of work getting to a point where it is "normal". See More

Top Pro

Graphing , charting, and other math/numeric capabilities

The interactive editor is able to display complex equations, charts, graphs, etc. making this particular editor very well-regarded among data scientists. See More

Top Con

First time setup is more difficult than for other IDEs

Since Jupyter Notebook really requires two programs (the server and your browser) getting things setup in a way that works for you is a little more complex than for an ordinary IDE. For example, if you run the server and edit on the same machine, creating a little wrapper script that starts the server and then launches the browser pointing to it and gives an icon to this script is a small amount of setup but is more involved than a simple installer for other IDEs. Likewise, if you do remote development, creating a URL that will lazily spawn the Jupyter Notebook server and then turn it down when it is no longer in use is also a little bit of work to setup. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Because it is open source, you can review the source code and also propose extensions and fixes to it. It is also possible to fork the repository and make changes to it to customize it for your specific use case. See More

Top Con

Non-trivial security configuration for remote access

By default, the editor is only accessible from localhost; however, if you want to run Jupyter on a VM in the cloud and do your editing through a web browser on a different computer (e.g. a Chromebook), there is some non-trivial security work to ensure that it is set up in a secure manner. See More

Top Pro

Supports multiple different programming languages

Jupyter Notebook, formerly known as ipython, used to be specific to Python; however, in recent iterations, it has become capable of general purpose usage for any programming language. Thus it is possible to use this and have a consistent developer workflow, regardless of language. See More

PyCharm has CVS, Git, Subversion and Mercurial integration. See More

28 5

score 306 · Answer 11

PyCharm Community Edition

Top Pro

Version control integration

Top Con

Memory-hungry

Can use a lot of memory (several GBs), especially when dealing with large projects. See More

Top Pro

Sophisticated autocompletion

PyCharm includes sophisticated heuristics for determining what each variable type is and providing autocompletion suggestions for them. See More

Top Con

Can sometimes become very slow, freeze, and become unresponsive

It becomes extremely frustrating when you have to wait for the text you've typed to appear in your editor. Furthermore, during these freezes the editor does not always queue what your're typing, so you might have to wait > 15 seconds before you can continue your editing. This quickly affects the concentration of a developer, causing flow interruption and general performance degradation. See More

Top Pro

Excellent refactoring support

There are many refactoring options including renaming and changing signature across entire projects. It also includes the an ability to preview changes before committing and exclude anything unwanted. See More

Top Con

Feature incomplete

Some features are locked behind a paywall. Although if you are a student, you can apply for the Student Pack. See More

Top Pro

Excellent debugger

PyCharm can leverage run-time information when running your application with the built-in debugger to figure out what types can possibly be passed to which functions, etc. See More

Top Pro

Framework support

PyCharm supports cefpython and electron.js (with c bindings). See More

Top Pro

Pro features Free for students

JetBrains offers a Student Pack, which gives you a student license and access to the pro features of selected products such as PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA and Php Storm. See More

PaizaCloud launches new development environment server just in 3 seconds. So, you can casually create or destroy server. See More

306 38

score 39 · Answer 12

PaizaCloud IDE

Top Pro

3 seconds instant launch

Top Pro

Floating window manager

PaizaCloud provides Floating window manager like Windows or Mac by default. It makes the environment more flexible. PaizaCloud also provides Tab window mode when you want to use the full screen for one purpose. See More

Top Pro

HTTP/HTTPS access to any ports

PaizaCloud allow you to access almost all ports for HTTP/HTTPs access. See More

Top Pro

No credit card required

No credit card is required for FREE plan. See More

Top Pro

Internationalization

PaizaCloud's Editor or Terminal fully support non-ASCII languages like Japanese, Chinese, European languages. See More

Top Pro

Extensible PaizaCloud app

PaizaCloud provides standard application like File manager, Editor, Terminal. But, PaizaCloud also provides the possibility to add or even create new App-for-PaizaCloud using HTML/CSS. See More

Top Pro

Terminal with root

In PaizaCloud, you can sudo to root. So, you can install packages, or run service freely. See More

Top Pro

Supports Jupyter notebook

PaizaCloud has Jupyter Notebook support with Python libraries like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, or matplotlib built-in. See More

Top Pro

Google Home / Google Assistant development in the browser

As PaizaCloud runs in the cloud, you can develop and run the Google Home / Google Assistant application, without deploying to another server. See More

Specs

Spacemacs combines the Emacs platform (with the full power of the Emacs plugin ecosystem) and the Vi keybindings (via EViL), all in the same box. See More

39 8

score 602 · Answer 13

Spacemacs

Top Pro

Combines the best parts of Vi and Emacs

Top Con

Can be quite glitchy at times

Spacemacs combines many packages from many different authors that were never designed to work together. Sometimes they interact in unexpected ways, and things randomly break as one package interferes with another's features. This combined with frequent package updates and necessary customization by selection of layers and packages, can make these glitches hard to reproduce. It takes a lot of emacs know-how to fix these problems. Fortunately there is a very active community willing to help with these problems, but it might take a while. See More

Top Pro

Simple but powerful configuration architecture

At the heart of Spacemacs, the configuration layers group packages configuration into semantic units that can be toggled on and off. The architecture is simple but powerful, allowing the user to easily manage configuration dependencies between hundreds of packages. See More

Top Con

Complex learning difficulty

You must be familiar with either Vim or Emacs. In addition, you should be familiar with the unique features of Spacemacs. The Layer concept of replacing Emacs settings is still difficult and abstract compared to modern editors. See More

Top Pro

Community-driven configuration

Spacemacs is the biggest community-driven Emacs starter-kit. See More

Top Con

Functionality layers of complicated configuration

To configure Spacemacs, settings for Emacs/Evil/Spacemacs may need editing. It's not always clear which need to be changed or how to change settings globally: sometimes hooks are needed, other times Spacemacs provides options. See More

Top Pro

Above average documentation quality

Documentation is mandatory for each new configuration layer and can be accessed directly within the editor in Org format. See More

Top Con

High CPU and unresponsive at times

There are occasions when Spacemacs would suddenly consume a LOT of CPU and then other times would become completely unresponsive. This instability took place only 6 months or so ago. Restarting Spacemacs can fix it for a while but perhaps this issue is already fixed in newer versions. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Emacs runs on Gnu/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. See More

Top Con

Relative low startup time

Although configuration is heavily loaded, the starting time of Spacemacs is usually between two and five seconds. Emacs can be run as a daemon though which reduces the client's startup time to a few milliseconds. Still not as bad as other editors though, especially Electron based ones like VSCode or Atom. See More

Top Pro

Completely configured out of the box

Stuff like version control, file management, good default theme are all configured out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Mnemonic and consistent keybindings

Space-lead key bindings are organized in mnemonic namespaces. For instance, buffer actions are under SPC b, file actions are under SPC f, project actions are under SPC p, search actions are under SPC s, and so on. Keybindings are consistent across the whole distribution thanks to a set of conventions. See More

Top Pro

Can be controlled fully with the keyboard

There's no need to reach for the mouse again since Spacemacs can be fully controlled with keyboard. See More

Top Pro

Gradual learning curve

Evil package is a first class citizen and Spacemacs embraces it from day one. Evil package allows Vim users to be productive very quickly while still allowing regular Emacs users to use Spacemacs. See More

Top Pro

Remote file editing

Files can be edited in Spacemacs remotely. See More

Top Pro

Great note-taking and agenda mode built-in

Allows for great organization applications that can be saved in future-proof format, plain text, can be integrated with org, LaTeX, markdown, HTML, Literate Programming and be committed to source control. See More

Top Pro

Offers a number of practical features

Spacemacs has some great features for taking notes, tracking to-do lists, and tracking time. See More

Top Pro

LaTeX support

LaTeX allows for auto-completion, syncing, and more. See More

Top Pro

Manage many code bases easily

Top Pro

Daemon support

Has great daemon support, which can mitigate the issue of slow startup. See More

Top Pro

Can work in terminal mode

Sometimes you only have terminal access, over ssh or something. See More

Top Pro

Great CFEngine support

Syntax highlighting and org-babel extensions. See More

Top Pro

Great support from the community

The community surrounding Spacemacs is very active and there is a welcoming gitter chat for users to ask questions. See More

Top Pro

Lowers the risk of RSI by using the spacebar as leader

Spacemacs got its name from the fact that it is uses the space bar as a default leader key. The key was chosen because it is easy to press and to hopefully lower the risk of RSI. See More

Top Pro

Fast-paced development

New functionalities and fixes are added to Spacemacs every day, while release cycles are short. See More

Top Pro

Easily extended with community plugins

Top Pro

Works well with Common Lisp

Top Pro

Manage R files easily

Top Pro

Great Clojure support

Top Pro

Excellent support for Elixir programming language

Elixir layer which uses the Alchemist package is the best way to edit Elixir code out there. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD

License:GPL-3.0-or-later

Since Version Control features are very frequently used these days, having them built right into your IDE seems quite the right thing to do. With Komodo, you can perform your Git push-es and pull-s right while you're coding. See More

602 74

score 75 · Answer 14

Komodo IDE

Top Pro

Built in Version Control

Top Con

Not free

Komodo IDE costs you $89 for a personal license. Even though they have a Free basic version (that's also opensource), but this lacks most of the functionality that the paid version has. See More

Top Pro

Collaboration tools

If you're working with a remote dev team, you'll quickly realize the importance of code collaboration while programming. With the Komodo IDE you don't have to setup a separate teamviewer session, or even share code via dropbox with other devs. All you need is an ActiveState account (+ a partner with the KomodoIDE ofcourse) and your remote team could see LIVE and contribute to your changes in the source files of your app See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux

Cross Platform:Yes

Git:Yes

PyCharm is amazing and easily the most feature option out there. But KDevelop is faster and has all the features needed for python develop. Opening new files, moving from file to file, code and syntax checks, everything happens instantly. In the end the speed is what won me over to use KDevelop, when code is in my mind I don't want to wait on my IDE. See More

75 15

score 22 · Answer 15

Kdevelop with kdev-python

Top Pro

Blazingly fast

Top Con

Works with no problems only on Linux

KDevelop is an IDE for the KDE platform. Even though it's cross-platform, it's mostly targeted at Linux systems and the versions for other operating systems are highly experimental. See More

Top Pro

Excellent syntax highlighting

Kdevelop has very smart syntax and semantic syntax highlighting. See More

Top Pro

Real-time static analysis

Kdevelop has a pretty powerful and sophisticated implementation of static analysis for Python. It's capable of pretty good type inference, tracking types and the expected groking of inheritance trees. See More

Top Pro

Best Vim bindings in an IDE

Most IDEs have very limited vim bindings, but KDevelop runs on the Kate editor. Kate is one of the most robust editors in the Linux world and is subsequently very functional. The Vim bindings are very close to complete with very few holes. See More

Specs

NeoVim was a complete rewrite of Vim, with new features added and underlying issues resolved thanks to the Vim code base. The keybindings and configuration are the same as Vim, so the switch can be pretty simple. See More

22 6

score 598 · Answer 16

Neovim

Top Pro

Still Vim but with upgraded features and some issues fixed

Top Con

Poor feature discoverability

Top Pro

Better integration with external tools

The core text editor is "headless", meaning it's detached from the user-interface so other programs can hook into it. This enables better integration with IDEs and browsers, where "Vim mode" has typically been a poor substitute because it was a partial rewrite or a partial port at best. One of the advantages of Vim has always been ubiquity and Neovim makes it even more ubiquitous. See More

Top Con

High effort to customize

A lot of time and effort is put in to make it specific to your needs. See More

Top Pro

Powerful plugin model

Vim plugins have always been useful, but tied to specific languages. Neovim's architecture provides better separation between plugins and the core product, so that plugins are completely flexible and can be written in any language. See More

Top Con

Requires Brain Mode Switching

When editing in vim, you have you use the vim keys; when editing in every other window on your PC, or in Word or Excel or other application, you need to use the standard system key combinations. Learning the vim combinations can actually make you SLOWER at everything else. See More

Top Pro

Built-in terminal emulator

This avoids the user having to make any installations. See More

Top Con

Consume brain energy for editing that should be used for logic

Text editing in vim can be great once you've learned it, but it requires thinking about combination of commands. In other editors, you don't have to think about how to delete this part of code. You just think about how to implement a feature, what is a good design for this code. Even after you get used to using vim, it still requires your brain for editing. See More

Top Pro

UI Agnostic

The core functionality is handled apart from the UI, meaning that Neovim can be embedded into any other GUI system, such as Atom. See More

Top Con

Ambiguity in extensive documentation

Top Pro

Async plugin execution

Top Con

Limited cross platform support

Neovim is not available for many legacy platforms See More

Top Pro

Active development community

Top Con

Split the VIM community

Moolenaar to be blamed for. If he opened up the development for vim to other bright minds, no fork would have happened. As it is mostly compatible with vim, it is not such a big issue. See More

Top Pro

Opens a 3Gig Text File in a few seconds

Not many editors can open such a large text file so quickly. See More

Top Con

Poor support for external tooling

Top Pro

Fast and light on memory usage

New neovim editor instance starts instantly and you can have multiple editors open at the same time, because id does not require a lot of memory to run. See More

Top Pro

Easier to pick-up than ever

Don't believe it? Try typing vimtutor in your command line right now. See More

Top Pro

Work in TUI (Text User Interface)

Neovim can work on terminal, on a remote server over ssh. See More

Top Pro

Modern code base

As a refactor over Vim, Neovim has greatly improved its code base. For example, some functionality is handled by libuv, the same code base that powers Node.js. See More

Top Pro

Comes with some good configurations out of the box

Some typical configurations most of VIM users make are default in Neovim. See More

Top Pro

Even more powerful since 2019, because of additions such as vim-coc, TabNine, fzf, skim

Vim gets stronger every time command-line tools get stronger. This isn't even it's the final form. See More

Top Pro

Config file is where it should be

I don't like having dotfiles or dotdirs in my homefolder unless they're needed. Configs should be in the .config dir in their respective folder. See More

Top Pro

Built-in file-explorer and ability to make splits and edit multiple things simutaneously.

This makes editing multiple files at once, moving code around so easy. See More

Top Pro

Treesitter and LSP

Top Pro

Terminal mode is very convenient for testing code in a split window

Specs

Platforms:Linux, Windows, macOS, *nix, Android

598 90

score 325 · Answer 17

Geany

Top Pro

Light and fast

Geany is very lightweight thanks to the smaller offering of features. See More

Top Con

Not very advanced

Although it has some IDE features, it is not as advanced as some other text editors that can be extended to contain IDE functionality. See More

Top Pro

Built-in plugin manager

Geany has a built-in plugin manager which can be used to install plugins and add new powerful features to the editor. See More

Top Con

Windows installer not digitally signed

Top Pro

Quick search on large files

In Geany you technically search once for a whole search query, unlike Gedit, where once you start typing, the file is searched for in accordance with each substring of what you're typing, all the while leading to terribly annoying lag. See More

Top Con

Not many third-party plugins

Geany is not as popular as some other text editors with plugin support. As such it's understandable that it's missing lots of powerful plugins available in other editors. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Geany is a cross platform editor, very similar to Notepad++ in Windows. See More

Top Pro

Build in terminal

Press F5 and code will run without the need to switch between windows. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed Free (as in freedom) Software

This software respects your freedom. See More

Top Pro

Real syntax parsing (not just coloring)

Hence it is capable of showing the methods and inner classes of, e.g., a Java source file. See More

Top Pro

Simple project management

Top Pro

Native

It is a real app and not another frankenstein web/electron app. This means it runs great and doesn't extraordinary amounts of RAM. See More

Top Pro

Options in the menu are easy to find

For example, there is an easy way to change the font and theme in the View menu. No need to search through several syntax styles like in Notepad++ just to be able to change the used font. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

License:GPL-2.0-only

Auto Complete:Yes

Released under the MIT license. See More

325 63

score 106 · Answer 18

Spyder

Top Pro

Free and open-source

Top Con

Not beautiful

The default theme is not beautiful. And there are not many themes. See More

Top Pro

Graph plotting support

Spyder can plot graphs and provide the list of all variables. See More

Top Con

The documentation is poor when it comes to debugging

Not a lot of information about debugging is available in the documentation. See More

Top Pro

Enables to write consistent code

Pylint integration enables to check the code for PEP8 style guide and detect errors. See More

Top Con

Consumes a lot of memory

If you're working with large data, especially arrays, another IDE should be considered as spyder uses at least 200-300Mb of memory. See More

Top Pro

Powerful autocompletion

Spyder's autocomplete features are made possible by a library called rope which gives Spyder powerful autocompletion. See More

Top Pro

Has cross platform support - Linux, Mac, and even Windows

Spyder (formerly Pydee) has support for all of the major operating platforms - Linux, Mac, and even Windows. See More

Top Pro

Helps you to use documentation

Top Pro

Intuitive interface

Top Pro

Relatively lightweight

Top Pro

Has support for Vim bindings via plugin support

Aside from being an open sourced, actively developed IDE, vim key-binding support is also available. If you remember Pydee - this is it, albeit with a new name. See More

Top Pro

Good GitHub project

Top Pro

Excellent variable explorer

Dynamic variable explorer with editor and visualizer See More

Top Pro

Completely Python

Specs

Multi Language Support:No

106 27

score 309 · Answer 19

PyCharm Professional Edition

Top Pro

Version control integration

PyCharm has CVS, Git, Subversion and Mercurial integration. See More

Top Con

Very high memory usage

Memory usage is usually anywhere around 1-2GB and possibly larger with larger projects See More

Top Pro

Catches run-time information when running the code

PyCharm can leverage run-time information when running your application with the built-in debugger to figure out what types can possibly be passed to which functions, etc. See More

Top Con

Not suitable to edit project's files written in other languages

There is a high variety of support for a lot of languages like markdown etc. Not for Java and so on, but it is a Python IDE. See More

Top Pro

One of the best autocompletion engines around

PyCharm has two types of autocompletion: structural completion and word expansion. Structural autocompletion makes predictions based on its understanding of Python and JavaScript objects, while the latter tries to predict the word currently being typed based on previously typed words. Word expansion also works in comments and docstrings and it's similar to vim's omnicompletion. Both types of autocompletion work extremely well, have little to no problems and are quite fast even when loading suggestions on the go. See More

Top Con

Some relatively basic functionality requires paid license

JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, SQL requires a paid license. Also, all Python frameworks require a paid license. See More

Top Pro

Great pip support

PyCharm offers great pip integration. When opening a project it automatically checks for a requirements.txt file in the root of the project. If it's found, it checks if all the libraries are available in the interpreter. If one or more libraries are missing, it issues a warning and asks whether you want to install any missing libraries. See More

Top Con

Odd Autosave "feature", can't be disabled fully

PyCharm automatically saves your files for you, always, without telling you. You can't disable this. There's a way to indicate if a file has been modified via an indicator in the tab (not enabled by default - why?). If you exit it won't ask you if you want to save the modified file. Totally unintuitive and contrary to all other established workflows. It's ok to try something new, but give users the option to have the "normal" behaviour of any other IDE/editor out there. Can be a deal breaker for those that need to know/have control over when they save their files. (PyCharm offers a history to undo the automatic save, but why force a user to undo something with extra steps that shouldn't have happened in the first place?) See More

Top Pro

Free version available

There's a community edition (with limited features) that's free to use. You can also get a 30-day trial of the Professional edition. See More

Top Con

Not possible to run scripts in a single console

Top Pro

Excellent integration with debugging tools

All the debugging can be done inside the IDE. Breakpoints in the code can be added using keyboard shortcuts or the mouse. When the code is executed through the debugger a toolbar pops up with all the relevant context needed for the debugging process. The whole process is smooth and painless and you don't even have to switch windows to do the debugging. See More

Top Con

It cannot reindex on the fly packages installed from git source

If you've installed a package with the command: pip install -e git+https://pass@github.com/me/package.git@0.0.3#egg=package you have two options available to make PyCharm update/see it: restart PyCharm invalidate caches See More

Top Pro

Excellent refactoring support

There are many refactoring options including renaming and changing signature across entire projects. It also includes the an ability to preview changes before committing and exclude anything unwanted. See More

Top Con

Asinine licensing scheme

JetBrains licensing, especially if you have multiple products, is a blocker. You just can't have a fixed line-item price (for departmental budgeting) for their licenses. See More

Top Pro

Free student access to Professional Edition

With a valid .edu address students can register to use the Professional edition and enjoy all the perks of the full paid version for free. Though it should be mentioned that the with the free student acess you cannot use PyCharm for any commercial purposes, even accepting donations for an open source project. See More

Top Con

Vim mode is limited

Top Pro

Vim mode for people used to Vim commands

IdeaVim supports motion keys, insert mode commands, marks, registers, visual mode commands, vim regexps, key mapping, macros, digraphs, some ex and :set commands. You can find a full comparison in the IdeaVim reference manual. See More

Top Con

Rendering is awful

Top Pro

Great for navigating large codebases

PyCharm has amazing code navigation implementations. It supports both goto symbol and goto declaration. The former finds classes, variables, functions, etc by name. While the latter is used by moving the cursor on top of a symbol and by using the mouse or a keyboard combination it finds the declaration of that symbol and takes you there. Both of these features are extremely helpful when consulting large code-bases and when trying to understand an API written by someone else. See More

Top Con

Little native desktop integration

If you use Linux with Gnome or KDE, PyCharm does relatively little to integrate into your local desktop environment See More

Top Pro

Automatically figures out what test to run based on the method the cursor rests at a given time

PyCharm, based on what method or class the cursor rests, can figure out what tests to run and perform them with a keyboard shortcut or two, without breaking up the flow and need to switch to a command line interface. See More

Top Con

Sometimes all autocomplete stuff dies with over 9k Java exceptions with no visible reason

Top Pro

Built-in Django support

Pycharm has excellent django support, from templating to management commands, it has it all. See More

Top Pro

Easy to optimize code with built-in profiling tools

If you have a yappi profiler installed on your interpreter, PyCharm starts the profiling session with it by default, otherwise it uses the standard cProfile profiler. See More

Top Pro

Remote debugging over ssh coupled with automatic deployment creates a streamlined workflow

The professional version allows remote debugging over ssh, which together with automatic deployment creates a streamlined workflow. See More

Top Pro

Supports installing third party libraries

No need to go to the command line to download a new package, PyCharm has an easy system to browse, download, and update third party packages. See More

Top Pro

Has a lot of plugins

PyCharm offers a high variety of plugins like Pylin, Mypy etc. covering all the above mentioned. Plus it has a built-in support to detect wrong formatted/named things (inspection). See More

Top Pro

Amazing direct database integration

Pycharm supports SQLlite, PostgresQL, Mysql, etc out of the box and is integrated very nicely with Pycharm. Making database modifications could never have been easier as changing a cell value and committing the changes straight from pycharm. See More

Top Pro

Sophisticated static analysis tools

Specs

Price:$200/years

Cross Platform:Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD

Auto Complete:Yes

Emacs can be controlled entirely with the keyboard. While true, I often find the mouse and menus handy for those lesser-used commands. An aide-memoir. See More

309 71

score 846 · Answer 20

Emacs

Top Pro

Keyboard-focused, mouse-free editing

Top Con

Learning curve is long

While it's better than it used to be, with most functions being possible through the menu, Emacs is still quite a bit different from your standard editor. You'll need to learn new keyboard shortcuts. See More

Top Pro

Total customizability

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp). A robust list of existing Lisp extensions include the practical (git integration, syntax highlighting, etc) to the utilitarian (calculators, calendars) to the sublime (chess, Eliza). See More

Top Con

Sometimes the extensibility can distract you from your actual work

If I ever want to lose half a day, I'll start by tweaking my .spacemacs config file. See More

Top Pro

It's also an IDE

You can debug, compile, manage files, integrate with version control systems, etc. All through the various plugins that can be installed. See More

Top Con

Keyboard combinations can be confusing for new users

For example, for navigation it uses the b, n, p, l keys. Which for some people may seem strange in the begging. However they can be changed easily. See More

Top Pro

Works in terminal or as a GUI application

You can use Emacs' command line interface or graphical user interface. See More

Top Con

Documentation is not beginner-friendly

Although lots of good built-in documentation _exists_, I have after four years of Emacs as my primary editor not figured out how to actually make use of it, and rely completely on Google / StackOverflow for help. See More

Top Pro

Self documenting

Emacs has extensive help support built-in as well as a tutorial accessed with C-h t. See More

Top Con

User interface is terrible

I was using Emacs in the early 1980's, before there were GUIs. In fairness to Emacs, its original design was conceived in that context and is rather good at some things, like flexible ability to bind commands to keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, it didn't keep up with the times and fails to take advantage of the entire world of GUI design that's revolutionized computer science since then. So Emacs does 5% or what an editor should do quite will, and is surprisingly under-powered and old fashioned at the other 95%. To this day, it lacks or struggles with very basic things, like interactive dialogs, toolbars, tabbed interface, file system navigation, etc., etc. The things I just mentioned, are all present in some limited and inept form, but falls far short of current standard of good user interface design. For this reason, I would not recommend Emacs to anyone who is under 50 year old, or who needs power user capabilities. For casual, unsophisticated applications by someone who grew up with green screen character based computers, it's probably OK. See More

Top Pro

Free

Licensed under GNU GPL. See More

Top Con

Emacs lisp is very poorly designed

The language that's used for user customization, extensions, and for much of the basic editor functionality, is Emacs lisp, or elisp for short. I actually like lisp in general, especially Scheme, but unfortunately, elisp is one of the worst versions of lisp ever created, barely meriting being called lisp. It's very slow, impoverished in features, inconsistent, and rather inelegant in design. Elisp needed to be overhauled 20 or 30 years ago, but the Emacs developers were not willing to do the work. I believe this is one of the major reasons Emacs is so buggy, lacking in features, development is so slow, and consequently almost nobody uses it (or should use it) anymore. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

With 30+ years of use the Emacs documentation is very thorough. There are also a lot of tutorials and guides written by third parties. See More

Top Con

Very poorly maintained

It's not clear to what extent Emacs is still supported. There's still some development taking place, but so slow that it's almost an abandoned project. There are numerous bugs in Emacs, many these days associated with start up and package management. When you search the Internet for solutions, you often find many posts, sometimes going back months or even years, with no clear fix. See More

Top Pro

Vi keybindings through Evil mode

Evil mode emulates vim behaviors within Emacs. It enables Vi users to move inside the Emacs universe. See More

Top Con

Hard customization

For customization, you need to learn Lisp. See More

Top Pro

Provides org-mode

Advanced planning and publication which can start as a simple list. See More

Top Con

A lot of jokes in this serious software

Top Pro

Enormous range of functionalities (way beyond simple "text editing")

Through its programmability, a very broad range of functionalities can be integrated in emacs, turning it even into a "single point of contact" with the underlying operating system. See More

Top Con

Using Emacs on a new machine without your .emacs file

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Works on Linux, Windows, Macintosh, BSD, and others. See More

Top Pro

Integrates planning in your development process

You can jump straight from your org-mode files to programming tasks - and back - and build a seamless workflow. See More

Top Pro

Versatile

Emacs is great for everything. See More

Top Pro

Mini buffer

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer. See More

Top Pro

Ubiquity

Fully compliant GNU-emacs is available on many platforms, and they all understand .emacs configuration files. See More

Top Pro

Rectangular cut and paste

Emacs can select rectangularly. See More

Top Pro

Lisp customizations

With lisp customization, any behavior of Emacs can be changed. Update with pre-release patch can be also applied without recompiling the whole Emacs. See More

Top Pro

Visual selection and text objects with Evil

Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects. See More

Top Pro

dabbrev-expand (Alt-/)

Dynamic word completion. See More

Top Pro

Support multi-line editing, multiple frame, powerful paren, crazy jumping style

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video. See More

Top Pro

Has been widely used for a long time

The first verion of Emacs was written in 1974 and GNU Emacs in 1984. See More

Top Pro

Helm plugin adds even more power to Emacs

Powerful commands, search, and more with the Helm plugin. See More

Top Pro

GTK+ widgets support

Since version 25 you can run GTK widgets inside Emacs buffers. One of these is the WebKitGTK+, which allows the user to run a full-featured web browser inside Emacs with JavaScript and CSS support among other things. See More

Top Pro

Excelent tutorial to get you started

The tutorial you are presented with at startup shows you exactly what you need to get started and teaches you how to use the built-in help yourself later. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Shells

Emacs has a number of shell variants: ansi-term, shell, and eshell. See More

Top Pro

Emacs provides magit, the best and most complete GIT interface

Complex git history editing become a breeze with very few keystrokes. And simple ones are quickly stashed in muscle memory. Git becomes an direct extension of your brain thanks to Magit. Cherrypicking, blaming, resetting, interactive rebasing, line level commit, spinoff branches... you name it, magit already has it and has typically all those 5 to 10 git CLI commands of higher-level patterns also tide to one simple shortcut (want to amend a commit three commits away ? forgot to branch out and you've got already N commits on master ? ... etc... ). See More

Top Pro

Gnus

Managing several large mailing lists has never been easier using Gnus. The threading commands and the various ways of scoring articles means that I never miss important messages/authors, etc. A joy to use. See More

Top Pro

Eshell is cross platform

You can use the underlying operating system shell as a terminal emulation in an Emacs buffer. Don't like the default shell for your configuration? You can change it to your liking. See More

Top Pro

Excellent Lisp editing support

Built-in packages make editing Lisp source code feel natural. See More

Top Pro

Use-package and org-mode

Missing some neural package that predicts actions, maybe in the next release ... See More

Specs

Platforms:Unix-like, macOS, Windows, Cygwin

License:GPL-3.0-or-later

Auto Complete:Yes