Choosing the Best Python IDE

  • My experience so far:

    I have used Python under IntelliJ IDEA and find it unbearably slow. I am not sure if Pycharm would be faster than IntelliJ IDEA.

    Spyder2 is great, except that I have had it crash several times. The deal-breaker has been debugging support. When I hit "step into function" on the current line, it runs out of the current function. And there is no call-stack.

    PTVS (Windows-only) seems to be fast enough. In some cases though I see exceptions showing up in the console window that are not reflected in the IDE, leading to confusion. Hope they fix this.

  • These type of reviews always focus on Pydev. They should take a look at Aptana, which is basically Pydev with a bit of tweaking - it has syntax highlighting for django templated and other web types stuff (php, javascript, json).

    Another benefit of using an Eclipse IDE is the wide array of plugins for other languages. I have a Perl plugin and SQL plugin. I like being able to use the same IDE when I do need to switch languages, which is so far what has put me off trying Pycharm or Wing.

  • I always keep going back to Editra. Its been around a long time, its written in Python and its an IDE for all programming languages not just Python -- and of course its free as in beer no matter if I am on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. When not in Editra I am always using iPython as on those projects I don't need an IDE with everything that iPython provides me, quite liberating!

  • I don't really use a IDE, but my friends who do like Spyder. It would be nice to see a review of IDEs for scientific software development. The things I need are interactive console, visualization (matplotlib), and debugging.

  • +1 for PyCharm. The guys from JetBrains are doing a great job and keep improving it. Performance today is much better than it was half a year ago.