I few weeks ago, Jetbrains (the ones that make the excellent PHPStorm, IntelliJ, RubyMine and others) released the community version of PyCharm – and since I code python most of the day…woohoo! I had tried other IDEs but nothing really stuck so I just kept using Sublime for the last year or two, which worked so so. Sublime is just a pretty notepad, there isn’t that much more to it (I DO like writing my essays on it though).

After about 2 weeks on PyCharm, I can already feel a difference. I’m not very good with the shortcuts yet, but all the small annoyances that make up that stinky PEP-8 specification are starting to sink in (notice the nice space after every comma?). It also helps you with small idioms and repetitive chunks of code. Case in point:

if a < 10 and a > 20:
    dostuff()

Will yield a squiggly line that you can click and…

if 10 > a > 20:
    dostuff()

Boom! Simplified chained comparison. Of course it also tells you which vars are not used, or referenced before being set and other nice nifty things – but these little tricks add up. I cannot recommend this IDE enough (it’s fast too!), try it – your codebase will definitively benefit from it.