Mostly through plugins really. Jedi is really awesome for autocomplete: https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi-vim https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi-vim This p

Mostly through plugins really. Jedi is really awesome for autocomplete: https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi-vim https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi-vim This plugin really helps in formatting code: https://github.com/hynek/vim-python-pep8-indent https://github.com/hynek/vim-python-pep8-indent There's another plugin that helps with PEP8 linting: https://github.com/nvie/vim-flake8 https://github.com/nvie/vim-flake8 I just use a combination of print statements and pdb for debugging, I don't trust automatic re-factoring for Python though, so I tend to do them manually with regex. What really helps vim beat PyCharm/IntelliJ for me is the fact that I work with a lot of C code as well as Python. IntelliJ's C support sadly isn't quite there yet.