I also think there's something to it being forced to think about your code rather than just relying on your IDE. In the past I saw random functions getting extracted to random modules and imported everywhere because PyCharm makes it so easy to do so, with no real thought as to where it belongs, which led to some weird circular import error happening pretty much every month.
IMO python's lack of explicit typing makes it difficult to reason about by inspection alone ("does foo() return a dataframe or a numpy array?!"). For me at least, I need to get into the guts of a system and watch it execute to really understand it. The print() debug crowd tend to be much better than me at reasoning about code by inspection alone, but when you work on something complex that you didn't write yourself, that only gets you so far.
That doesn't work great on other people's code, obviously.
I might be one of these print() people- usually when I hit bugs I read through the stack trace and can figure it out, but if it's more of an "unexpected result" I resort to print() so I know exactly what I'm doing. Would love to learn a more efficient way
Key commands I use while in pdb: ? for help; n to run the next line; s to step into the next function call; w to see where I am in the stack; u and d to go up and down the stack; unt to run until a new line is reached (if you're stuck in a loop); interact to go to a normal python shell (if the pdb shell is confused by what you typed).
This won't replace print statements 100% of the time, because it might be simpler to print a bunch of logs to see where the problem is than to step through the program in the debugger; use it when you know where the problem probably is but not what it is.
I do tend to reach for a simple log first though. I find it's ofte quicker to place a bunch of log statments than step through every statment. The debugger comes out for more complex issues.
My use-case where Pycharm feels a bit deficient is that I have an Ubuntu deeplearning box at work that I can VNC into and develop on whenever needed. I have all my repos cloned locally and work on various projects locally (and Pycharm is my IDE of choice on the Ubuntu box). But when I work from home, VNC feels a bit too sluggish and remote development would be much better for me. The vscode experience is pretty fantastic. I can setup SSH access to my box and have an open project for the same repos that I have cloned locally on my Ubuntu box and it's as if I am working on it natively. Everything is super snappy and even my bash sessions have the correct remote venvs activated correctly.
In contrast, every time I tried mimicking this in Pycharm (the paid version), it seemed like there was no way to link my already cloned repos on the Ubuntu box to my local version on my laptop so that work I did locally would always also be "live" on my Ubuntu box so that were I to VNC into my Ubuntu box and open the same project in my local Pycharm IDE, it would exactly mirror the state of my Pycharm IDE on my laptop. Is what I want possible? Everything I tried seem to result in my laptop Pycharm setting up a new project somewhere on my Ubuntu box where it would SFTP my project files to, but that resulted in a duplicate of my repo in some other location, which is not what I want. Hopefully this made sense?
I'm very interested in this, so looked it up.
For your use case, I think it's just a matter of setting the correct Deployment Mappings. There's a setting when you're creating the remote interpreter to specify your own mapped directory (not the default /tmp/pycharm-foo) and a checkbox to not have it automatically upload what you have on your local machine (since in your case the source of truth is the remote). Then you can manually sync the diffs yourself with pycharm or git.
Your workflow's interesting in that the remote machine is the main and your laptop's the satellite, and pycharm's model has it the other way around.
Also, if you've already got the interpreter set up, you can just change the deployment mapping settings.
Current statement:
> We're very aware of how important this feature is, and we have several initiatives in place to provide a great experience for fully remote development. Unfortunately, at this time we're unable to share any specifics or timeframes, as getting the best possible experience requires massive-scale architectural changes to our codebase, but we've been working on this for quite some time already and we believe that we will have a solution that will go above and beyond what VS Code delivers today.
What you want is for basic text editing to run locally (to minimize latency) and heavy duty services (like language services or search) to run on the remote server where accessing a file only requires a file system call instead of a network call. Then, after gathering the required information it can send that over some kind of pipe to your text editor.
This is the workflow that VSCode has set up and it's very good. In many ways, even if you're used to vim, VSCode's setup is preferable to vim over ssh shell due to lower latency.
Yeah, it’s an efficient setup that doesn’t actually work because it’s lacking in features.
But I admit, I work on a weird product stitched from different languages, there's just no IDE that handles that particularly well as far as I know. If I was back to working on Python only I might switch back to PyCharm.
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/features/python/
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/python-tutorial
Both include quite capable debuggers, and AI powered code completion, intelicode.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...
But it is getting better, that's for sure. Looking forward to see upcoming iterations.
Early on I used Eclipse plugin for similar reasons - unified debugging across multiple platforms.
However your allegiance sounds interesting. Can you give some reasons why you like it so much?
In no particular order, here are all the things that I love about Pycharm and that Vscode doesn't really compete on at the moment:
1. Integration of IPython shell (if you install IPython in your project venv) with Pycharm is absolutely amazing. Copy-pasting multi-line code just works. It handles all the auto-indent stuff. You have keyboard shortcuts to directly send highlighted sections of code in the editor to the shell. You can even add a plugin (Python code cell) to make the editor work like Spyder/Matlab's cell mode
2. Excellent history browser of all commands entered in the IPython shell. This is extraordinarily handy as I end up doing all my code prototyping directly in the IPython REPL, fix all the edge cases and issues interactively, and then just grab the things that work and graduate them to a script/function/class. This reduces the overall time to code things up and I end up with far less bugs.
3. The code completion/intelligence is unbelievably good. Vscode's intellisense is really really bad in comparison when it comes to Python. With Vscode, the tab completion almost always feels nonsensical with the ordering of things making no sense, and a lot of times just plain wrong things being suggested in tab completion. By contrast, Pycharm's code completion is really smart, and extremely helpful, especially when filling in method signatures, or trying to tab-complete instance attributes/methods. It is smart enough to even parse type-hinting from docstrings and provide code completion accordingly, which vscode fails at.
4. Refactoring is a lot easier. Code inspection tools are pretty powerful
5. Related to the fantastic REPL experience in Pycharm, the debugging experience is hands-down the best Python debugging experience I have found. Also, the integrated variable viewer/explorer is really really nice and makes debugging that much easier/faster
6. PEP8 linting + auto style refactoring is really good in Pycharm. I've found vscode lacking considerably in that department. Pycharm ends up catching a lot of silly mistakes that vscode doesn't (example: forgetting to have your first param be `self` for an instance method).
7. Managing your project venvs and dependencies is also much easier and more robust in Pycharm. Pycharm will alert you the moment any file utilizes imports not installed in your venv and will also highlight missing dependencies in your requirements.txt / setup.py
I'm sure I'll think of more, but these are some of the top things that come to mind. It is a really fantastic product and what's crazy is that all of the above you get with the free community edition! I actually want to purchase the pro version but haven't found any need for it. I was interested in the remote-code development capabilities but unfortunately have been pretty underwhelmed by that aspect of Pycharm. Vscode seems to have a much better UX on that front imho.
Pycharm really shocked me by correctly suggesting most of library related stuffs as ling as I type hint them.
I really enjoyed pycharm and datagrip and wondering how does clion compare with vs.
But it's not pycharm; the debugger is very much lacking, often failing to resolve or step through.
But this is likely because Rust is not a primary target for the IDE.. I haven't tried any complex C++ in it yet.
PyCharm is (AFAIK) monolithic in what it brings to the table, whereas VSCode is more modular. As such, some of your points are true, but not an inherit fault of VSCode, but probably of some settings/underlying tools used. Maybe these can get you a better experience:
3. Agreed with VSCode being lackluster, but switching to MS Language Server [0] has helped this a great deal (while having other downsides, like being slower).
5. VSCode also has a variable viewer/browser and an interactive shell (which cannot be IPython as of today, however [1])
6. Disagree: I forgot what VSCode uses per default, but I switched to `black` for formatting, which works very well (` "python.formatting.provider": "black"` in settings.json). For linting, I switched to `mypy` (which also handles type hints, which is helpful), which can be set via `Python: Select Linter` (CTRL+SHIFT+P). `mypy` seems to be powerful. It definitely catches method 1st arguments not being `self`.
0: https://github.com/microsoft/python-language-server
1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47701629/vs-code-run-ipy...
6. Yup, it supports linting, but my point was that Pycharm has better overall support for linting/code-intelligence in that it is better at auto-fixing things or having shortcuts to do so, without having to resort to something as extreme as `black`. It handles multi-line strings, or just general formatting of multi-line stuff perfectly. If I hit enter after `long_var_name = `, it will automatically put in a back-slash so you can continue writing a multi-line expression. I edit in both vscode and pycharm and I usually will still find useful things that the Pycharm linter catches or code-formatting things that Vscode does not (and I have tried a dew different linters though perhaps I should give mypy a shot).
I raise all these as a big proponent of vscode. Nothing would make me happier than to switch to it for all my Python development work as I enjoy the UX a lot more over Pycharm in the code writing/editing side of things. But Pycharm is just superior in so many ways that improves my productivity that I have not been able to make the swap despite several attempts.
It is very slow over sshfs for instance, whereas other editors work very well (sublime, vscode..). Also, vs code has a very good remote development plugin.
That said, it isn’t rocket surgery. ETL, web services, and FS/image tools lately.
Neovim's master branch has a built-in Language Server Protocol client and Treesitter implementation, both of which have pre-made configs for Python development. Jumping between symbols, viewing floating documentation/signatures/git-blame, asynchronous completion, diagnostics, etc. are all readily available with a fraction of the battery/CPU/memory usage on a fully-FOSS platform that works on even more platforms (BSD, over SSH, etc). Jumping between symbols and listing usage of an object in a project with hundreds of files has never been faster. All this starts up in milliseconds. Being able to use an editor advanced enoguh for a large project but lightweight enough to launch with a keybind just to write the HN comment is amazing.
Here are some screenshots of the LSP and treesitter in action:
Floating documentation and diagnostics: https://i.imgur.com/0TYi5en.png
A small taste of Treesitter's highlighting + navigation features: https://i.imgur.com/wrSpJ2X.png
Completion from the nvim-lsp source: https://i.imgur.com/CzAAJuC.png
Neovim also has FZF integration to fuzzy-search thousands of symbols, files, reference, etc. Since it's the same FZF that I use everywhere else underneath, the interface is quite familiar.
TLDR: Neovim is a lightweight text editor that integrates with external tools to transform itself into an IDE.