IDEs - Which do you use and what add-ons/tips/tricks to do you have?

[ns-rse]

Having a good IDE experience vastly improves your productivity as you can navigate code faster, auto-format and lint code on the fly, run tests in a more focused manner etc. all of which shortens the feedback loop and in turn development time.

I thought it might be useful to have a discussion on what people use and perhaps show-case.

Obviously you should all be using Emacs, but I know VSCode and PyCharm are popular and there are others like Spyder.

Most are actually using the Language Server Protocol in the background but for Python there are, as with many other situations, lots of packages that do the same thing.

• Pylsp
• Jedi Language Server
• Palantair (deprecated)
• Pyright
• Python (Microsoft)
• Ruff

Which do people use? Why? Any Pros/Cons/niggles? How do you configure it?

There are also often additional add-ons that smooth the flow. For Emacs I use

• pyvenv for switching between virtualenvs.
• python-pytest for running tests.
• blacken for blackening buffers.
• flymake-ruff for ruffling my files.
• numpydoc for generating Numpy-style doc strings from class/def.
• EIN for running iPython/Jupyter Notebooks in Emacs (Emacs Ipython Notebooks).

TreeSitter is something I've started playing with recently too as at a bare minimum it gives consistent syntax highlighting, but can do so much more (e.g. generate doc strings on the fly.

[Joe-Heffer-Shef]

I use PyCharm Professional edition using their free educational license: JetBrains Free Educational Licenses

Pros

• Excellent IDE with code navigation, project management, auto-complete, debugging, etc.
• Lots of plugins for other file types (markdown, bash, docker, etc.)
• Database integration (it can connect to SQL, NoSQL, etc.)

Cons

• High resource usage
• Complicated

I also rate VSCode and Notepad++ quite highly in general.

[bobturneruk]

I could talk about vscode.

[twinkarma]

Covered 15/04/2024