Integrated development environments

Integrated development environments

  • Spyder IDE has great support for data science, but lacks in code navigation / refactoring / typechecking abilities.

  • Atom, with a design similar to VS Code; however, with Microsoft buying GitHub in 2018, most of the improvements are now made to VS Code

  • PyCharm is a full-featured IDE. It offers slightly better refactoring options than VS Code. It requires a commercial license for some data science options, and is more heavy-weight than VS Code, but for its configuration and CPU/memory usage.

I’m personally using VS Code <https://code.visualstudio.com/>, and members of the groups I am working with have switched to it, sometimes keeping Spyder on the side.

Advantages of VS Code:

  • integrates well with modern Python tooling

  • handles multiple languages (including LaTeX!)

  • many extensions for Python-related tools

  • quite lightweight, both in resource use and user interface

Disadvantages:

  • designed for a single editor window (with split code panes), use with multiple monitors is messy

  • the extension ecosystem needs a bit of curation, and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by choices