DevelopmentProductivity

What are the best free IDEs for Python?

20

Options
Considered

235

User
Recs.

Oct 14, 2018

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

20 Options Considered

Best free IDEs for Python	Price	Auto Complete	Multi Language Support
89 PyCharm Community Edition	-	–	–
87 Vim	Free	Yes (with aid of ctags better)	Yes
-- Spyder	-	Yes	No
-- Spacemacs with Python layer	-	Yes	Yes
-- Visual Studio Code	FREE	Yes	Yes

PyCharm Community Edition

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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

Memory-hungry

Can use a lot of memory (several GBs). See More

Faris L.'s Experience

very simple and powerful for Python developers. 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

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

Version control integration

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

Top Con

Feature incomplete

Some features are locked behind a paywall. 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

Vim

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Top Pro

Keyboard-based, mouse-free interface

You never have to reach for the mouse or the ctrl/alt buttons again. Everything is 1 or 2 key presses away with almost 200 functions specifically for text editing. If you insist on a GUI, versions of vim like gVim or MacVim allow you to use the mouse and familiar platform shortcuts, which can help ease the learning curve. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

You'll spend a lot of time learning all the commands and modes supported. You'll then spend more time tuning settings to your needs on each machine you use it. See More

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes (with aid of ctags better)

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

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

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

Excellent performance

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

Top Con

Unintuitive mode switching

Top Pro

Once learned, it's very hard to forget

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

Ubiquity and portability

Vi/vim exists on almost all Unix-like platforms, it is 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

High effort to customize

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 such as Chromebooks via SSH. See More

Top Con

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

Vim relies on certain tools and features being available to it in order to interact with the system clipboard. When using Vim over SSH, for instance, it doesn't have the ability to push a buffer to your local clipboard as it can when it's running locally. When it's compiled with GUI support, it uses an interface like the xclip/xsel or pbcopy/pbpaste tools to push a specially-named buffer to your clipboard. On X11 systems, using "+ will place your yank/delete into the selection buffer. On other systems, it behaves the same as "*, which places your yank/delete into the system clipboard. When Gvim or when using a terminal where Vim has been built with mouse support, it switches to Visual mode when you try to select with the mouse. In a terminal window, you can usually bypass this behavior by holding one of either Shift or Control, and the terminal will behave as if Vim hadn't captured the mouse input, and you will be able to use your terminal's capability for making selections, copies, and pastes. You can also disable the mouse in Vim, by adjusting the value of ":set mouse". See More

Top Pro

Avalailability of sophisticated plugins

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. Vim can be made into a sophisticated IDE with just a few plugins, such as YouCompleteMe and CtrlP. 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 Pro

Vimtutor

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

Top Pro

Lightweight and fast

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

Top Pro

Free and open-source software

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

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

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

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 most of Vim's functionality accessible without frequent awkward finger reaches. See More

Top Pro

Everything is a 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. You want to delete, so you select "d", you want it to happen inside something, so "i", and you want the surrounding double-quotes, so just ". 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 number of different extremely useful commands, without the effort it takes to remember all of the Emacs "magic incantations", for example. 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 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

Spyder

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Top Pro

NumPy array editor and dictionary editor

Variables created during the execution of a file can be explored and edited through several GUI based editors like a dictionary and NumPy array one. See More

Top Con

Poor debugging docs

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

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes

Multi Language Support:No

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

Top Pro

Matlab-like interface

Spyder can plot graphs and provide the list of all variables and a repl 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

Cross Platform

Based on QT library See More

Top Pro

Syntax Colouring

Top Pro

PyLint integration

Top Pro

Graph plotting support

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

Top Pro

Free and open-source

Released under the MIT license. See More

Top Pro

Code introspection

Spacemacs with Python layer

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Top Pro

Mnemonic and consistent key bindings

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

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

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

Top Pro

Combines the best parts of Vim and Emacs

Spacemacs combines the Emacs platform and Vim UI in the same box. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

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

Top Pro

Customizability

Top Pro

Support for different languages with layers

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

Top Pro

Community-driven configuration

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

Top Pro

Free/Libre/Open

Top Pro

Above average documentation quality

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

Visual Studio Code

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Top Pro

Integrated debugging

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

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

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

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 Pro

Extendable through plugins

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

Sublime Text 3

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Top Pro

Blazing fast

Sublime Text is known for being extremely fast to start & use. See More

Top Con

Not technically free (unlimited free trial)

Sublime text is $70 to purchase, but does provide an unlimited free trial. However, the nag window to upgrade can be a pain. See More

Jesse Aldridge's Experience

Straight-forward editor that works for just about any language. Lots of plugins. Lightweight and reliable. Good set of features. Elegant design. See More

Top Pro

Rich plugin ecosystem

Better than Sublime itself is it's community that create plugins for every need. See More

Top Con

Closed source

Top Pro

Low memory requirements

Significantly lower memory requirements than alternatives like Atom, Brackets or Visual Studio Code which run in a webview (or whatever the correct terminology is), which can make a difference when working on a large project and/or when working on lots of files simultaneously. See More

Top Pro

Works everywhere/OS agnostic

Looks the same across Windows, OS X and Linux. See More

Top Pro

Very ergonomic (easy access to files, command pallete)

Top Pro

Customizable using Python

Small Python code snippets can be used to provide functions the plug-ins do not provide. See More

Top Pro

Numerous small but useful features

Autocomplete, copy file path, run current file, view whitespace on highlight, auto highlight all instances of the selected word, fast find and replace across all files -- Sublime has many such quality of life features that are all well implemented. See More

Top Pro

Limited "jump to declaration" functionality for dynamic languages

Atom

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Top Pro

Built-in package manager and rich ecosystem

Search for and install new packages or start creating your own—all from within Atom. Also using apm install command. Great package ecosystem, including packages for linting (pylint, flake8) and connecting to remote kernels (hydrogen). See More

Top Con

Speed

It’s a browser-based app (runs on Electron), and is a bit slow to load and sometimes to respond. See More

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes (plugin)

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes (plugin)

Cross Platform:Yes

Top Pro

Customizable

Top Con

Written in Coffeescript

Most of the core is written in coffeescript, but the team at Github is transitioning to ES6 (the modern edition of Javascript). See More

Top Pro

Works everywhere/OS agnostic

Looks the same across Windows, OS X and Linux. See More

Top Pro

Very ergonomic (easy access to files, command pallete)

Almost all shortcuts are the same as Sublime Text. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source software

THE open source alternative to Sublime Text. See More

Top Pro

Themable

Top Pro

Under the hood is a web app

Top Pro

Smart autocompletion

Top Pro

Extensive list of packages

Atom has a built-in package manager and an extensive list of packages. Packages are written in CoffeeScript. See More

Emacs

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Top Pro

Runs over SSH either in terminal or GUI

Top Con

Steep learning curve

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

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

Top Pro

With many other modes (plugins) you have project management systems and lots of other stuff for developers

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 Pro

Total customizability

Customizations can be made to a wide range of Emacs' functions through a Lisp dialect. 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 Pro

flake8 for continuous checking

Top Pro

Free

Licensed under GNU GPL. 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 Pro

Built in support for many version controls like GIT, Mercurial, subversion, CVS etc

Top Pro

Built in app store/package library with easy install

Top Pro

Pep8 support

Top Pro

Self documenting

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

Top Pro

Can fetch files via tramp mode over various protocols like ftp and ssh

Top Pro

Easy debugging of python code

You can use pdb inside emacs to easily debug Python code through the M-x pdb command. See More

Geany

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Top Pro

Multi-Platform

Is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. See More

Top Con

Some features are missing on other platforms

The Windows version lacks the integrated console window. See More

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

Top Pro

Fast and responsive

Opens very fast. Stays responsive even on big files. See More

Top Con

The project management tools are weak

Moving project files from one location to another breaks the project file. See More

Top Pro

Light on resources

Takes up very little HDD space and RAM. Is rarely stressing the CPU. See More

Top Con

Very configurable

The amount if options can be a bit intimidating. Configuring can take some time. See More

Top Pro

Very configurable

You can easily change what parts of the main window are shown/hidden. How to deal with spaces and tabs. See More

Light Table

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Specs

Auto Complete:Y

Multi Language Support:Y; Language integrations (like inline eval) for Clojure, ClojureScript, Javascript, Python, HTML, and CSS

Platforms:Windows; macOS; Linux

Integrated Debugger:REPL

Eclipse with PyDev

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Top Pro

One of the few that can debug Jython code

It handles both Jython and CPython. See More

Top Con

UI can be confusing

There's an overly abundant presence of menus, this forces you to constantly click around the different menu structures. See More

Jerry Hicks's Experience

Pydev remote debugging for free. See More

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options, Eclipse is very customizable. 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

Large selection of plugins

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

PaizaCloud IDE

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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

Tsuneo Yoshioka's Experience

I can develop Python program in the cloud without installing python locally. I can even run Jupyter Notebook. See More

Specs

Auto Complete:Yes

Multi Language Support:Yes

Bracket Matching:Yes

Cross Platform:Yes

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

HTTP/HTTPS access to any ports

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

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

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

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

3 seconds instant launch

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

Ninja IDE

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Top Pro

Syntax highlighting

Top Con

Latest version (2.3) is from 2013

But it looks like the project is still maintained towards 3.0 release. See More

Top Pro

Extensible

Plugins can easily be created to add features that you may need but are otherwise missing from the IDE. See More

Top Con

Bad performance

Freezes and slows down often. See More

Top Pro

Virtualenv support

Has out of the box support for virtualenv, which can be added when first starting a project or later through the settings. See More

Top Pro

Embedded Python console

Has an embedded python console built in. See More

Top Pro

Script runner

It is possible to run the project or any file opened in the editor with just one click. See More

Top Pro

Find in files / find usages

Allows you to search one or more words, a regular expression, etc. See More

Top Pro

Breakpoints

Top Pro

Multi-platform

GNU/Linux OS X Windows See More

Top Pro

Built-in static analysis

NInja IDE highlights both static and PEP8 errors in a file. With each type of error having its own icon. See More

Top Pro

Web-inspector

Top Pro

Render HTML files

Also supports rendering HTML files currently loaded in the editor. See More

Top Pro

Project management

Allows you to manage projects, saving descriptions and information about them and letting the user to perform file management related task inside the IDE itself. See More

Top Pro

Easily locate code

Code locator allows quick and direct access to any file, function or class inside one of the project by simply pressing a few keys. Pressing Ctrl + K open a popup over a text field, where you can type the name of what you want. See More

Top Pro

Symbols explorer built in

You can easily see all functions, classes and attributes in the current program. See More

Top Pro

Written in Python

Top Pro

Bash support

Top Pro

Sublime snippets

Top Pro

Multi-language support

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