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2014-01-21 What editor with Python

I usually use SciTE when programming Python. It is simple and fast. Plus, I usually do not use a debugger. I sometimes use Notepad++ but the shortcuts are different and I never really tried to change them. I once tried PyScripter but the project seems to be intermittently maintained.

I recently tried the free version of PyCharm and it is very to use. Create a project is not difficult, adding existing files too. And it was possible to change the shorcuts as I wanted. One feature I liked was the easy installation of setuptools and pip. The professional version offers support for django.

I tried The Eric Python IDE a long time ago but it seemed too complex for my needs. Python Tools for Visual Studio is a also nice integration, interesting for big projects. I'm surprised to see features such as creating a file setup.py, creating a sphinx project, using cx_Freeze. I'm wondering if I'm not going to switch from an editor to another one depending on what features I will need for the current project. To conclude, if you want to use a tablet, you can use Python Anywhere. You can check other alternative on Wikipedia. Don't forget to check the date of the latest release first. Older than a year is not a good sign.

If you do machine learning a lot, it might be interested to use an environment designed for that purpose such as WinPython. It includes Spyder which has been updated to Python 3.3 last year. It also includes IPython with the notebook which makes it easier to test some of the steps I went through in this previous blog More about interactive graphs using Python, IPython, ...


Xavier Dupré