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Anyone have any opinions on Python 3 development is Atom, VSCode, or Sublime? I’ve got a 5 year old Mac with 16GB of RAM, so I’m simply looking for which edito

Anyone have any opinions on Python 3 development is Atom, VSCode, or Sublime? I’ve got a 5 year old Mac with 16GB of RAM, so I’m simply looking for which editor is best for developing scripts. Autocompletion, error detection as I type, etc

deleted 8y ago
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dagw 8y ago
VSCode is fine for python development on my 8 year old MBA with 4 GB of RAM so you shouldn't have any problems at all.
bobwaycott 8y ago
I've spent years programming Python in VSCode. After years of programming Python in Sublime. It's very good. Plenty of plugins, pretty effortless to get project-wide intellisense, jump-to nav, etc. You can customize linting for certain classes of errors easily. My absolute favorite feature has been VSCode's hover tooltips that show documentation of just about everything--not just for standard lib, but all your dependencies, and all your project code. I just can't go back to not seeing the docstrings on classes and functions when I hover over them--it's effortless to review purpose, order of arguments, and whatever else has been documented. EDIT: For fairness of comparison, while I find VSCode is superior for QoL via its impressive defaults and great extension ecosystem, SublimeText is vastly superior where navigating code is concerned--opening a file, and the instant preview of the file as Sublime fuzzy matches what you're typing is unmatched. Navigating symbols in Sublime is also light-years faster--instant, compared to VSCode making me wait every time I try to find a symbol while it loads them up--even in files that I frequently have open and expect it should just know what's there by now. Also, if I'm going to open a very large file, like an SQL dump or something similar, I won't even try that in VSCode. I reach for Sublime.
Wohlf 8y ago
VSCode or Sublime can easily do this with a few extensions, they have fantastic Python community support. VSCode will be easier to setup. VSCode will use more RAM and be slower to startup but if you're just developing scripts and don't go crazy with extensions it won't be a major difference with 16GB of RAM. Atom in my experience is dog slow. PyCharm is overkill for scripts, but the features are very nice once things start getting big.
_coveredInBees 8y ago
Eh, I'd recommend Pycharm or even Spyder over any of the 3 you mentioned for Python script development. Pycharm can have a bit of a steep learning curve since it is a very powerful IDE and things can get a bit overwhelming initially, but it has the best debugging experience you can find in Python land. The interactive debugging in (I believe) an iPython shell is fantastic, as are the variable explorers, etc. Spyder is very rough around the edges but is fantastic if you are looking for a MATLAB like IDE experience to develop scripts in. The integration with iPython is fantastic and prototyping scripts is a breeze. Debugging though is a lot more rudimentary in comparison to Pycharm. VSCode is making progress on the Python side of things but there are still numerous drawbacks to the current Python dev experience: 1. Python linting does not update in real-time but only on saves which isn't particularly great. You can hack around it by setting a low auto-save interval, but that is not for everyone. 2. The Python shell for interactive coding is not an iPython shell but a basic Python one, which means you don't get all the awesome things that iPython gives you like tab completion, introspection, magics, etc. 3. The debugging experience in VSCode is pretty great but the interactive console in VSCode during debugging only allows single lines of code of entry which is severely limiting. 4. It's a lot easier to setup and configure local venvs for testing in PyCharm along with different run configurations to pass command line args to your scripts, etc. VSCode can do this, but you have to edit a JSON config file and it isn't nearly as easy or polished. I want to use VSCode for Python development since I use it all the time for most everything else including all Javascript work that I do, but I keep going back to Pycharm because it just ends up being a lot easier to use and makes me a lot more productive when coding in Python.

deleted 8y ago

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dagw 8y ago

VSCode is fine for python development on my 8 year old MBA with 4 GB of RAM so you shouldn't have any problems at all.

bobwaycott 8y ago

I've spent years programming Python in VSCode. After years of programming Python in Sublime. It's very good. Plenty of plugins, pretty effortless to get project-wide intellisense, jump-to nav, etc. You can customize linting for certain classes of errors easily. My absolute favorite feature has been VSCode's hover tooltips that show documentation of just about everything--not just for standard lib, but all your dependencies, and all your project code. I just can't go back to not seeing the docstrings on classes and functions when I hover over them--it's effortless to review purpose, order of arguments, and whatever else has been documented. EDIT: For fairness of comparison, while I find VSCode is superior for QoL via its impressive defaults and great extension ecosystem, SublimeText is vastly superior where navigating code is concerned--opening a file, and the instant preview of the file as Sublime fuzzy matches what you're typing is unmatched. Navigating symbols in Sublime is also light-years faster--instant, compared to VSCode making me wait every time I try to find a symbol while it loads them up--even in files that I frequently have open and expect it should just know what's there by now. Also, if I'm going to open a very large file, like an SQL dump or something similar, I won't even try that in VSCode. I reach for Sublime.

Wohlf 8y ago

VSCode or Sublime can easily do this with a few extensions, they have fantastic Python community support. VSCode will be easier to setup. VSCode will use more RAM and be slower to startup but if you're just developing scripts and don't go crazy with extensions it won't be a major difference with 16GB of RAM. Atom in my experience is dog slow. PyCharm is overkill for scripts, but the features are very nice once things start getting big.

_coveredInBees 8y ago

Eh, I'd recommend Pycharm or even Spyder over any of the 3 you mentioned for Python script development. Pycharm can have a bit of a steep learning curve since it is a very powerful IDE and things can get a bit overwhelming initially, but it has the best debugging experience you can find in Python land. The interactive debugging in (I believe) an iPython shell is fantastic, as are the variable explorers, etc. Spyder is very rough around the edges but is fantastic if you are looking for a MATLAB like IDE experience to develop scripts in. The integration with iPython is fantastic and prototyping scripts is a breeze. Debugging though is a lot more rudimentary in comparison to Pycharm. VSCode is making progress on the Python side of things but there are still numerous drawbacks to the current Python dev experience: 1. Python linting does not update in real-time but only on saves which isn't particularly great. You can hack around it by setting a low auto-save interval, but that is not for everyone. 2. The Python shell for interactive coding is not an iPython shell but a basic Python one, which means you don't get all the awesome things that iPython gives you like tab completion, introspection, magics, etc. 3. The debugging experience in VSCode is pretty great but the interactive console in VSCode during debugging only allows single lines of code of entry which is severely limiting. 4. It's a lot easier to setup and configure local venvs for testing in PyCharm along with different run configurations to pass command line args to your scripts, etc. VSCode can do this, but you have to edit a JSON config file and it isn't nearly as easy or polished. I want to use VSCode for Python development since I use it all the time for most everything else including all Javascript work that I do, but I keep going back to Pycharm because it just ends up being a lot easier to use and makes me a lot more productive when coding in Python.