Choosing the Best Python IDE

My experience so far:

I have used Python under IntelliJ IDEA and find it unbearably slow. I am not sure if Pycharm would be faster than IntelliJ IDEA.

Spyder2 is great, except that I have had it crash several times. The deal-breaker has been debugging support. When I hit "step into function" on the current line, it runs out of the current function. And there is no call-stack.

PTVS (Windows-only) seems to be fast enough. In some cases though I see exceptions showing up in the console window that are not reflected in the IDE, leading to confusion. Hope they fix this.

These type of reviews always focus on Pydev. They should take a look at Aptana, which is basically Pydev with a bit of tweaking - it has syntax highlighting for django templated and other web types stuff (php, javascript, json).

Another benefit of using an Eclipse IDE is the wide array of plugins for other languages. I have a Perl plugin and SQL plugin. I like being able to use the same IDE when I do need to switch languages, which is so far what has put me off trying Pycharm or Wing.

I always keep going back to Editra. Its been around a long time, its written in Python and its an IDE for all programming languages not just Python -- and of course its free as in beer no matter if I am on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. When not in Editra I am always using iPython as on those projects I don't need an IDE with everything that iPython provides me, quite liberating!

I don't really use a IDE, but my friends who do like Spyder. It would be nice to see a review of IDEs for scientific software development. The things I need are interactive console, visualization (matplotlib), and debugging.

+1 for PyCharm. The guys from JetBrains are doing a great job and keep improving it. Performance today is much better than it was half a year ago.