Good editor for python

[Thomas Jollans]

On 11/11/2018 10:14, Olive wrote:
> I am not a professional programmer but I use Python regularly for custom scripts (and plot with matplotlib). I have just learned VBA for Excel: what I found amazing was their editor: it is able to suggest on the spot all the methods an object support and there is a well-integrated debugger. I wonder if something similar exists for Python. For now I just use emacs with the command line pdb. What do people use here? Ideally I would like to have something that is cross platform Windows/Linux.

There are several popular full-featured IDEs, like PyCharm and Spyder.
AFAIK both also have some special support for a scientific workflow with
matplotlib integration.

If you're mainly using Python for scripts you invoke interactively to
create plots and such you might enjoy Jupyter Notebook or JupyterLab.
Completion works great, debugging with ipdb is, well, adequate.

For actual "editors", I'm sure there are ways to make vim or emacs
everything you could possibly want, but there are two popular, modern,
cross-platform programmers' editors that, to my mind, stand out at the
moment:

Sublime Text is a fantastic, powerful and (fairly) fast editor
(proprietary, shareware, 80 USD) with good support for Python with a
number of packages (plugins), chief among them "Anaconda", which gives
you linting and autocompletion.

Visual Studio Code (open source, from Microsoft) is younger and a bit
slower and more bloated, but it has fantastic Python support, including
a well-integrated visual debugger.

There are of course loads and loads of other options. Everything I've
mentioned runs at least on x86_64 Linux, OSX, and Windows.


-- Thomas