Emacs vs PyCharm Professional Edition

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.

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).

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

Licensed under GNU GPL.

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

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

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

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

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

Dynamic word completion.

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

You can pass complicated arguments in the mini buffer.

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.

Emacs can select rectangularly.

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

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

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

Review the "Emacs Rocks" video.

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

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

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

Emacs is great for everything.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Missing some neural package that predicts actions
Maybe in the next release ...

PyCharm has CVS, Git, Subversion and Mercurial integration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.