What is the best alternative to&#x20;Eric Python IDE?

Wing IDE provides local and remote debugging. See More

39 8

score 45 · Answer 2

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 3

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 4

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

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

63 8

score 306 · Answer 5

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

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

306 38

score 598 · Answer 6

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 7

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

Released under the MIT license. See More

325 63

score 106 · Answer 8

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 9

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

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 10

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

When compared to modern graphical editors like Atom and Brackets (which have underlying HTML5 engines, browsers, Node, etc.), Vim uses a sliver of the system's memory and it loads instantly, all the while delivering the same features. Vim is also faster than Emacs. See More

846 176

score 2402 · Answer 11

Vim

Top Pro

Lightweight and fast

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

Free and open-source software

Vim is open-source, GPL-compatible charityware. See More

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

You'll spend a lot of time learning all the commands and modes supported in Vim. You'll then spend more time tuning settings to your needs. Although once it's tuned to your needs, you can take your .vimrc to any machine you need and have the same experience across all your computers. See More

Top Pro

Works in terminal over SSH

Unlike other editors such as Sublime Text, Vim is a command line editor and hence can be used in remote development environments like Chromebooks via SSH. See More

Top Con

Difficult to copy, paste, and delete

Top Pro

Extremely portable

Vi/vim exists on almost all Unix-like platforms. It's the de-facto Unix editor and is easily installed on Windows. All you need to make it work is a text-based connection, so it works well for remote machines with slow connections, or when you're too lazy to set up a VNC/Remote Desktop connection. See More

Top Con

Poor support for external tooling

Many plugins depend on optional Python and Lua features, which may or may not be included in whatever binaries are available for your system. And without platform-specific hacks, it is difficult for plugins to operate in the background or use external tooling. See More

Top Pro

Keyboard-based, mouse-free interface, and trackpad support

There's no need to reach for the mouse or the Ctrl/Alt buttons again. Everything is a mere key press or two away with almost 200 functions specifically for text editing. Vim does support the mouse, but it's designed so you don't have to use it for greater efficiency. Versions of Vim, like gVim or MacVim, still allow you to use the mouse and familiar platform shortcuts. That can help ease the learning curve and you'll probably find you won't want to (or need to) use the mouse after a while. See More

Top Con

Poor feature discoverability

Though basic features like syntax checking, autocompletion, and file management are all available out of the box or with minimal configuration, this is not obvious to new users, who might get intimidated or assume they need to install complex plugins just so they can have this functionality. Other features new users might expect to find embedded in Vim, such as debugging, instead follow a UNIX-style model where they are called as external programs, the output of which might then be parsed by Vim so it can display results. Users not familiar with this paradigm will likely fault Vim for lacking those features as well. See More

Top Pro

Great productivity

Vim's keyset is mainly restricted to the alphanumeric keys and the escape key. This is an enduring relic of its teletype heritage, but has the effect of making my ost of Vim's functionality accessible without frequent awkward finger reaches. See More

Top Con

No smooth scrolling

Even with the GUI version, the lines jiggle line-by-line. If you are used to smooth scrolling, this is very annoying, especially when working with larger files. See More

Top Pro

Macros increase productivity

Many text editors have programmable macros, but since Vim is keyboard-based, your programmed macros are usually far more predictable and easier to understand. See More

Top Con

Doesn't play nice with the system cut/paste mechanisms

This can be worked around somewhat if you disable mouse for insert mode. You can then right-click your terminal and use paste like you would anywhere else in a terminal. But it still doesn't feel right when the rest of your system uses Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, and you have a system clipboard manager, and so forth. See More

Top Pro

Excellent performance

As it loads the whole file into RAM, replacing all string occurrences in 100 MB+ files is quick and easy. Every other editor has sort of died during that. It is extremely fast even for cold start. Vim is light-weight and very compact. In terminal, it only uses a small amount of memory and anytime you invoke Vim, it's extremely fast. It's immediate, so much so you can't even notice any time lag. See More

Top Con

Outdated UI

Top Pro

Tons of plugins/add-ons

This makes Vim the definitive resource for every environment (Ruby/Rails, Python, C, etc.), or simply just provides more information in your view. 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

Everything is mnemonic

No need to memorize different key combinations for things like deleting the text inside of a block or deleting the text inside of a pair of quotes. It's just a series of actions, or nouns and verbs, or however you prefer to think about it. If you want to delete, you select "d"; if you want it to happen inside something, you select "i"; and if you want the surrounding double-quotes, just select ". But if you were changing the text, or copying it, or anything else, you'd still use the same "i" and ". This makes it very easy to remember a large number of different extremely useful commands, without the effort it takes to remember all of the Emacs "magic incantations", for example. See More

Top Con

Slow when opening files with very long lines

A lot of very long lines can make Vim take up to a minute to open files, where a few other editors take only seconds to load the same file. See More

Top Pro

Vimtutor

Vimtutor is an excellent interactive tutorial for people with no prior experience of Vim. It takes about 30 minutes to complete. See More

Top Con

Consume brain energy for editing that should be used for logic

Text editing in vim is awesome, 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

Amazing extensibility

Vimscript provides a rich scripting functionality to build upon the core of Vim. When combined with things like Tim Pope's Pathogen plugin management system, it becomes easy to add support for syntax, debugging, build systems, git, and more. See More

Top Con

Foreign keyboards have a hard time on Vim out of the box

A lot of frequently-used keybinds are way harder to access on foreign keyboards because they use different layouts. For example, Germans use the QWERTZ layout, while French use the AZERTY. See More

Top Pro

Usable from a Terminal or with a GUI (GVim, MacVim)

If you happen to be logged into SSH, you can use Vim in a terminal. It can also run with a GUI too. See More

Top Con

Unintuitive mode switching

Top Pro

Has been supported for a long time

And will be supported for many years to come. See More

Top Con

Extensibility isn't that great

While it has gotten better and some projects are slowly starting to build proper extension support, it still can't and by design never will achieve the extensibility of another editor like emacs. See More

Top Pro

Once learned, it's very hard to forget

Vim's somewhat steep learning curve is more than made up for once you've mastered a few basic concepts and learned the tricks that allow you to program faster with fewer cut/paste mistakes. See More

Top Con

Works poorly out of the box with right-to-left

Top Pro

Can never outgrow it

The fact that very few, if any, people claim to be a "Vim Master" is a testament to the breadth and depth of Vim. There is always something new to learn - a new, perhaps more efficient, way to use it. This prevents Vim from ever feeling stale. It's always fresh. See More

Top Pro

Flexible feature-set

Vim allows users to include many features found in IDEs and competing editors, but does not force them all on the user. This not only helps keep it lighter in weight than a lot of other options, but it also helps ensure that some unused features will not get in the way. See More

Top Pro

Has multiple distinct editing modes

Interaction with Vim is centered around several "modes", where purpose and keybindings differ in each. Insert mode is for entering text. This mode most resembles traditional text entry in most editors. Normal mode (the default) is entered by hitting ESC and converts all keybindings to center around movement within the file, search, pane selection, etc. Command mode is entered by hitting ":" in Normal mode and allows you to execute Vim commands and scripts similar in fashion to a shell. Visual mode is for selecting lines, blocks, and characters of code. Those are the major modes, and several more exist depending on what one defines as a "mode" in Vim. See More

Top Pro

By default in Linux

All Linux distributions out there will have Vim built into them, which is highly convenient! See More

Top Pro

Vim encourages discipline

If you use Vim long enough, it will rewire your brain to be more efficient. See More

Top Pro

Useful undo features

Vim does not only offer unlimited undo levels, later releases support an undo tree. It eventually gives the editor VCS-like features. You can undo the current file to any point in the past, even if a change was already undone again. Another neat feature is persistent undo, which enables to undo changes after the file was closed and reopened again. See More

Top Pro

Donations and support to Vim.org helps children in Uganda through ICCF Holland

Top Pro

Built-in package management

Starting with Vim 8, a package manager has been built into Vim. The package manager helps keep track of installed plugins, their versions and also only loads the needed plugins on startup depending on the file type. See More

Top Pro

If you can use Vim you can also use vi

Top Pro

Works on Android

Top Pro

Productivity enhancing modal paradigm

As with all vi-like editors, Vim provides a modal paradigm for text editing and processing that provides a rich syntax and semantic model for composing succinct, powerful commands. While this requires some initial investment in learning how it works in order to take full advantage of its capabilities, it rewards the user well in the long run. This modal interface paradigm also lends itself surprisingly well to many other types of applications that can be controlled by vi-like keybindings, such as browsers, image viewers, media players, network clients (for email and other communication media), and window managers. Even shells (including zsh, tcsh, mksh, and bash, among others) come with vi-like keybinding features that can greatly enhance user comfort and efficiency when the user is familiar with the vi modal editing paradigm. See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous I/O support

Since Vim 8, Vim can exchange characters with background processes asynchronously. This avoids the problem of the text editor getting stuck when a plugin that had to communicate with a server was running. Now plugins can send and receive data from external scripts without forcing Vim to freeze. See More

Top Pro

Can set up keymapping

Top Pro

Multiple clipboards

It is called "registers". See More

Top Pro

Status Booster

Using vim not just increase your productivity, but helps you flex. See More

Specs

Platforms:Linux, macOS, Windows, Cygwin

License:Vim License

Price:0

Extension language:Vim

Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality. See More

2402 445

score 4160 · Answer 12

Visual Studio Code

Top Pro

Extendable through plug-ins

Top Con

Embedded Git isn't powerful enough

You can do nothing but to track changes, stage them and commit. No history, visualization, rebasing or cherry-picking – these things are left to git console or external git client. See More

Top Pro

TypeScript integration

There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript. See More

Top Con

The autocomplete and code check is not as powerful as the one on WebStorm

Sometimes it doesn't tell you if you made a typo in a method name or if a method is not used and several other important features. See More

Top Pro

Integrated debugging

VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript. See More

Top Con

File search is extremely slow

It's absolutely not possible to use this tool with big projects given how long it takes to search for files. See More

Top Pro

Ready to use out of the box

You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered. See More

Top Con

Project search limits results

Because file search is so slow your results are limited in order to simulate a faster search. See More

Top Pro

Integrated terminal

There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~ is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal. See More

Top Con

Very bad auto import

Top Pro

Great performance

For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well. See More

Top Con

Generalized

VS Code is a general code/scripting IDE built to be lightweight and for people familiar with their language of choice, not directly comparable to Visual Studio in power or scope. See More

Top Pro

Libre/open source

Released under the MIT License. See More

Top Con

Memory hog

Allegedly, VS Code is "lightweight". Yet, running multiple instances of it at once, you may get many "out of memory" messages from Windows despite 16 GB RAM. (While of course also running other things. The point is the comparison with some other IDEs/editors where running them alongside the same number of other applications doesn't cause Windows to run out of memory) See More

Top Pro

Fast and powerful

VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created. See More

Top Con

Poor error fix suggestions

Error detection and suggestions/fixes are poor compared to IntelliJ platforms See More

Top Pro

JavaScript IntelliSense support

JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code. See More

Top Con

A "me too" offering from MS, far behind other well established editors that it attempts to clone

Other IDEs specific to a language often offer better tools for deep programming. See More

Top Pro

Embedded Git control

Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows. See More

Top Con

Slow launch time

Slower than it's competitors, e.g. Sublime Text. See More

Top Pro

Updated frequently

There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily. See More

Top Con

Emmet plugin often fails on even simple p tags

Top Pro

ESLint integration

ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style. See More

Top Con

Have no good default js style analyzer

In WebStorm there is analyzer that checks for warnings and highlight this in yellow, here you cannot find or add it even with plugins. It is possible to have it as errors with linter but while you are actively changing file that's not very nice. See More

Top Pro

Extensions (aka plugins) are written in JavaScript

Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript. See More

Top Con

.sass linting is terrible

Top Pro

Active development

It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes. See More

Top Con

Is not an IDE, is a text editor

Top Pro

Integrated task runners

Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse. See More

Top Pro

It has gotten really good

All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need. See More

Top Pro

Custom snippets support

Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable. See More

Top Pro

Huge community behind it

The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows. See More

Top Pro

JS typechecking

It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option. See More

Top Pro

Python support

Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension. See More

Top Pro

Good support for new Emmet syntax

Top Pro

High fidelity C# plugin

The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support. See More

Top Pro

Support RTL languages

It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it. See More

Top Pro

Inline definition picking and usages finding

These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux

License:MIT, Proprietary (official builds)

Notepad++ has built-in support for syntax highlighting for a wide selection of programming languages. See More

4160 832

score 579 · Answer 13

Notepad++

Top Pro

Syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages

Top Con

Windows-only

While it can run in Wine, it is native only to Windows. Linux users will have to use Notepadqq instead. See More

Top Pro

Light and fast

Notepad++ is a very light program that starts almost instantly. This makes it a great text editor for users that want something that will start the second they open it. See More

Top Con

Settings confusingly scattered

Examples: try to change the tab size or used font. See More

Top Pro

Extendable via plugins

A list of hundreds of plugins is maintained. See More

Top Con

Annoying update notifications upon start-up

Annoying update notifications tend to pop up upon start-up after not having used the app or machine for a few days. At the same time, they can be easily turned off. See More

Top Pro

Portable

You can get a portable version of N++ and put it on a flash drive or your dropbox account and have your editor, configured the way you like, at any computer that you are on. See More

Top Con

Outdated UI

Only the text area can be themed, and it doesn't have as many features as browser-based text areas. See More

Top Pro

Free under GPL

Notepad++ is licensed under GPL, which means it is free/open source software that you can use freely. See More

Top Con

Limited new syntax support for new languages

It may be hard to find good plugins for relatively new languages. See More

Top Pro

Regex replace in selection, active tab, or all tabs

In Notepad++, the user can utilise regular expressions to quickly modify text across multiple files. See More

Top Con

Session backups not enabled by default

Unsaved tabs will be lost when Npp crashes, unless you first enable the session backup option. See More

Top Pro

Persistent documents, even after exiting the application

If you close Notepad++ (npp), your documents remain even if you haven't saved. See More

Top Con

User defined language doesn't support triple quote strings

It also doesn't support triple hashed comments. Both styles are overridden by their single character single line version. See More

Top Pro

User defined language syntax support

You can define your own custom syntax highlighting rules (or add support for others) . See More

Top Pro

Easy to use and admin

Very easy to use and personalize. See More

Top Pro

Multi-line editing

While it is disabled by default, when enabled, it is possible to edit more than one line at a time. This is helpful in many situations. See More

Top Pro

Split screen

The user can open and edit files in multiple screens within the editor window. See More

Top Pro

Supports Markdown

If you have the Plugin Manager installed you can search for MarkdownViewer++ and install it via that plugin. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows

License:GPL-3.0-or-later

For short scripts, a heavyweight IDE just gets in the way. It's also easier for beginners to understand. See More

579 161

score 19 · Answer 14

IDLE

Top Pro

Sometimes simple is best

Top Con

No Tabbing for Files or Shell instances

Idle's Interactive Python Shell and the Python Text Editor are separate window applications. Many would expect them to be unified together within a single window. To create a python program file, or module, the user first opens Idle (It's Interactive Shell), then the user goes to [File] and [New File] to open the Idle Text Editor. Plus, every time a new python file is opened, a new instance of Idle runs separately. So, there are no tabbed modules. That's clumsy approach that adds the complexity of juggling around many Idle instances. See More

Top Pro

Written in pure Python/tkinter

You can dig in and change how it works. See More

Top Pro

Included in standard Python distributions

You probably already have it. See More

Top Pro

Debugger

It has one. See More

19 9

score 44 · Answer 15

Eclipse with PyDev

Top Pro

Can be extended to have additional features through plugins

Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins. See More

Top Con

Just plugin for python, not full editor

It useful only if you use python as additional(secondary) language in your project on Eclipse See More

Top Pro

Feature rich including Django integration

Django Integration, Auto code completion, Multi language support, Integrated Python Debugging, code analysis, code templates ,smart indent, bracket matching, error markup, source control integration, code folding, UML Editing and viewing, and unit test integration. See More

Top Con

Plugins can be unstable

Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources. See More

Top Pro

Good integration of interactive python console even in debugging mode

Top Pro

Handles non-Python components well

If your project includes non-Python pieces (ie. Javascript, CSS, UML, etc) Eclipse tends to provide much better support for these than IDEs focused exclusively on Python. See More

Top Pro

Can use different environments for different projects

It's very handy for managing multiple projects that each use their own virtualenv or conda environment, you can assign a different interpreter to each project and they will handle things like code completion correctly. See More

Top Pro

Good font rendering

Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal. See More

Top Pro

One of the few that can debug Jython code

It handles both Jython and CPython. See More

Specs

Komodo Edit is not very lightweight and that can slow it down during startup. See More

44 20

score 31 · Answer 16

Komodo Edit

Top Con

Not very lightweight

Top Pro

Has built-in FTP

Komodo Edit has a built-in FTP client which allows developers to access remotely hosted files. See More

Top Con

Adds project files to project code

Top Pro

Free and open-source

Komodo Edit is the free and open-source counterpart of Komodo IDE. See More

Top Pro

Vim support

Komodo Edit has support for a limited Vim mode. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows; macOS; *nix

License:MPL; GPL; LGPL

With LT's inline evaluation, you don't have to re-compile your whole source file. Each time you want to see an output, all you have to do is hover your cursor over the line you'd like to evaluate and press ctrl+enter; LT will evaluate that line of code for you. See More

31 16

score 61 · Answer 17

Light Table

Top Pro

Inline evaluation

Top Pro

Your code runs live as you write it

The "Watches" feature lets you see your code running live as you type it. This means that you can debug your code live while writing it, which leads to considerably less programming errors. See More

Top Pro

Plugin manager available

LT has a plugin manager built directly inside of it. This plugin manager connects to LT's own registry of plugins, so whenever you want assistance while writing your HTML, JS, or even Python, just open up the plugin manager, search for it, and click the little install button beside it's name. Your plugin will then be installed. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

License:MIT

Integrated Debugger:REPL

Collaborative editing:No

Innovative approach to incorporate VS Code Python dev tools within Eclipse. Includes great HTML tools for web frontend development. The best of both worlds: syntax coloring, great intellisense, validation, debug in the best Eclipse debugger, code navigation... See More

61 31

score 8 · Answer 18

CodeMix

Top Pro

Newest Python tools for Eclipse

Top Con

Works as a plugin to Eclipse

So, if you're not an Eclipse user already and just want a simple editor there are other options. See More

Top Pro

Intellisense

Best code assist and validation available. See More

Top Pro

Great debugging

Fully integrated debugging in Eclipse for python (and everything else Eclipse does so well). See More

Specs

Price:5