PyCharm 2.0 beta (python ide)

If you don't have an opinion on PyCharm, this is why I care about it:

Most of the code I write is in JS, with a small amount of Python. For the longest time, I swore by Visual Studio + Visual Assist X for JS development - it's a weird combination, but the inline autocomplete was the best at the time.

Once VS started getting slow, I spent a lot of time looking around for JS IDEs - my main criteria was learning speed of the autocomplete system. If I typed something as simple as:

  function A() {
    this.brains = function(x, y) {}
  }
  A.prototype.branola = function(x, y) {}
  var a = new A();
  a.br

I expected the 'brains'/'branola' autocomplete to automatically appear inline. PyCharm/WebStorm was the only one that did this quickly. Others either couldn't do it, took forever, had keypress-based autocomplete, or just offended me in random other ways. Even IntelliJ, PyCharm's bigger and crazier sibling, was too slow (and seemed to lack the ability to just open a folder and have that be your project).

In more recent versions, they integrated VCS into the editor, so you could see your delta lines, and use keypresses for viewing and jumping between your uncommitted edits (which is the most ridiculously useful thing that no-one but me seems to want).

PyCharm 1.5 is quite nice, but it does have a couple of nasty issues. For example, it can't run Django in reload mode. Or, at least, PyCharm thinks that it can't [1] and the PyCharm folks keep on closing the Django reload bugs without any comment. Also, the VIM plugin is pretty unstable and creates weird input focus bugs (where I click on one pane and start typing only to have characters appear in another pane).

That said, PyCharm is worth it, even with some pain. Little features, such as autocompletion based on acronyms (e.g. 'sfn' will include 'someFunctionName' and 'some_function_name' in the suggestions), make it a delight.

[1] I can get PyCharm to run Django either with reloading or with debugging, by editing Django's runserver command to force reloading (but then debugging doesn't work).

Anyone developing on Linux should be keeping an eye on the WIP Python plugin for the KDevelop IDE. KDevelop features a world-class semantic framework that already provides it with top-of-the-line C++ support, but that's also proving to be up to the challenge of supporting a dynamic language decently - KDev-Python is certainly still fairly immature, but it already boasts semantic abilities that blow most of its commercial competitors out of the water, like collecting function argument types by the types of objects used at call sites, and tracking the types of list contents (Wing does the former to a degree, and Microsoft's Python tools for VS do the latter, but in both I've seen test cases fail that work well in KDevelop).

KDevelop also has a really nice 'semantic syntax highlighting' ability where the same thing (say, a variable) is shown in the same color through all control flow, which is already working well with the Python plugin.

A first beta of the plugin is supposed to be out soon.

(Disclaimer: I'm a KDE developer, but not involved directly with KDevelop.)

If you develop in python and/or javascript(and others but those are what I use most), and haven't checked out PyCharm you are missing out. I looked all over for a good ide with convenient things integrated(mercurial, git, gae, etc). Definitely the best thing out there IMO. The 2.0 changes are look nice so far.