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Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Eclipse either. Are there any good general-purpose open-source IDEs like Eclipse, but without the cruft? And for those who've used both, is JetBrain's PyCharm significantly better than the PyDev plugin for Eclipse?

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  >  is JetBrain's PyCharm significantly better than the PyDev plugin for Eclipse?

Yes. As it happens -- in almost all ways, and it's under rapid and sustained development. I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a general purpose Python IDE.

I have been using PyCharm for the past few weeks now, and boy its sleek ! However, there is another Python IDE launched recently called Spyder which looks promising too.

Spyder and PyCharm don't really compete and only minimally overlap. PyCharm is an Integrate Development Environment designed for writing large python applications, with particular support for python web applications.

Spyder (which has been around since 2009) on the other hand is an Interactive Development Environment focusing mainly on scientific computing and interactive data analysis and exploration, with lots of handy tools for poking around in and plotting data.

Both are great, but they target different uses and complement each other rather than directly compete.

For me, Komodo IDE has been amazing for the past few years. The free Edit version is great too, but needs a lot of plugins to reach feature parity (if at all) with its big brother. It's autocomplete and analysis for scripting languages is tops though. The XUL user interface toolkit means it even looks awesome and native under something like Elementary OS, much to my surprise.

Komodo is next to useless for autocompleting custom PHP or JavaScript code ie code in the project itself rather than a framework/library). The JS handling in the IDEA products is not perfect but its much better than Komodo’s and the PHP support is phenominal by comparison.

PyDev knows flask.ext.* . Community version of PyCharm doesn't. If you're doing flask development, it can be annoying.

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