9 reasons you should be using PyCharm | Hacker News Reader

9 reasons you should be using PyCharm

blog.michaelckennedy.net

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Jetbrains is a lovely company.

PyCharm is a nice IDE.

ReSharper is _required_ if you want to be on the .NET stack and not go insane.

They hand out open-source and academic research licenses under very reasonable conditions.

What's not to love?

Or you can use Emacs for free. Subscription based pricing model is a joke.

> Subscription based pricing model is a joke.

Agreed. I mean I don't mind buying software I use often and professionally (e.g. Sublime). I guess the way to look at it is you're paying for bug-fixes and new features as a Service. Still leaves a bad taste in my mouth though.

Sublime Text 3 + Anaconda [0] has enough features. And I never use a debugger. The reason being, if you can't debug it from logs in development, how are you going to debug it in production?

[0] https://damnwidget.github.io/anaconda/

It's not entirely subscription based. They have a "Perpetual Fallback License" for anyone who subscribes for more than a year ($89): https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

So you could say that you're "buying" the current version of the software as long as you buy yearly or subscribe for a year, they just don't say it that way.

Thanks for pointing this out, wasn't clear to me when I skimmed over the pricing. However, that page is also inaccurate as they've changed the versioning from v$X to $YYYY.$M [0]. I can't seem to figure out how long the "Perpetual Fallback License" will last without buying it and looking at my "account".

All in all, it's really confusing :/

[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2016/03/09/jetbrains-toolbox...

Not only that, but they deeply discount subscriptions if you are on for multiple years.

PyCharm is good. Happy to subscribe for good programs. If I can write 1% better code with PyCharm it pays for itself in one week a year.

I'd just like to give a shout-out to Jetbrains for being really responsive on their bug tracker! I've reported a couple bugs about PEP 484 type comments and they've acknowledged or fixed them usually within a week.

For in-editor git commands, I use vim-gitgutter. It's seriously cleaned up my commit history by letting me stage individual hunks of code, while still letting me implement changes in a stream-of-consciousness order.

https://github.com/airblade/vim-gitgutter

The remote support is the real gem. Integrated remote debugger. Completion even works for code running on a remote instance (e.g., via Vagrant).

I can get most of that done with vim and the shell is just a ctrl-z away.

Not to mention every languge eer made would work fine with it.

I've used vim all the time for a decade and PyCharm on and off for a few years. No, you can't. Every one of the features mentioned in the article is just so far ahead of what vim's equivalent has to offer, if there even is one.

No, regex based search/replace doesn't count as refactoring support. Vims omnicompletion is a joke. It also doesn't handle multi-language files (e.g. SQL like in the article) at all. And Vim is limited by its strictly monospace UI without good overlay support. The integrated debugger is so much nicer to use than raw pdb, and WinPDB sucks for navigation. And there are so many time-saving little features, like the auto-import quickfix.

And it takes a lot of work to get even half-baked versions of all the features in vim, because you have to get every one individually.

IntelliJ with Python plugin (instead of standalone PyCharm) has support for all very many, and certainly all popular, languages. And it's not like in Vim-land, where "support" mostly means "syntax highlighting and that's it".

Vim is an awesome text editor though.

There is a vim plugin for pycharm, rubymine, intellij and friends:

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/164?pr=idea

I use it on and off, when I miss vi, in order to remember why I don't use vi anymore.

Reason one: I write in half a dozen of languages, and PyCharm supports but one of them. Yes, totally.

Yeah, that's probably a good point even if you are downvoted. Plus performance is usually bad compared to Sublime and a lot of muscle memory can't be translated easily to another editor. Finally, a lot of integrated tools (Like SQL or Git integration) reach quickly their limit and you have to use the regular tools/CLI anyway.

Nope, you can install any language support. You can have the same support for Java as Intellij.

> Nope, you can install any language support.

OK. Show me support for OCaml, Rust, Erlang, shell, make, or CFEngine. Granted, I only write in half of these, but I'm not that far away from the rest.

Just open one file of these, PyCharm will display a nice popup "A plugin is available to support <x>. Would you like to get it?" Yes!

It worked for ini, dockerfile and terraform HCL (which I consider more exotic than the languages you gave).

Not sure whether shell and Makefile were a plugin or already present out of the box.

rust: https://github.com/intellij-rust/intellij-rust

erlang: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7083?pr=idea

bash: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/4230?pr=idea

What about the rest?

And Erlang plugin doesn't seem to give much that would suit Erlang development (syntax highlighting and identifier completion is not much, I would still need to go to command line for about every operation).

Guess the .1% of programmers who write Erlang aren't the target market?

Of course they are not. But why then am I supposed to be using PyCharm, as the title says?

I'm quite happy with geany, which is free and oss.

how about vs code? I am a recent convert and loving it.

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