While writing python code, integrating modules and libraries to build large systems, a simple text editor is not enough—we need a good integrated development environment for that. We did a survey of our visitors to DiscoverSDK of what is the best Python IDE, and here are the results: (Best first) PyCharm: Created by JetBrains; Closed Source. Jul 24, 2017 The Best Choice of Python IDE can easily configure the working environment, leading to better productivity. You can surely use any Python IDE of your preference, but a best Python IDE will facilitate our work a lot because the suggested configurat. Jan 22, 2019 Honorable Mentions. Spyder is a well-known free IDE with a full extension library and complete features. Komodo IDE is a powerful tool for Python developers, but they are well-known because of enterprise customers. According to the developer community at StackOverflow.com, Python is the fastest growing major programming language. This fits correctly. Sep 23, 2014 Python programming can be done from the command line, but an IDE makes life so much easier. With so many options out there, which one should you use? To help you decide, I’ve looked at five Python editors (all free). Although Python has been more of a Linux programming language, the last few years have seen its increasing use on Windows, so many of the five are cross-platform. Sep 16, 2019 1. Pydev with Eclipse – Best Python IDE (Free Tier) Pydev is the Python IDE for masses for the simple reason that it is free of cost and comes packed with powerful features for efficient Python programming. It is an open source plugin that runs on top of Eclipse and brings Python to. More Python IDEs. Wing IDE 101 is a simple and free Python IDE intended to help new programmers get used to coding in Python. There are a number of resources to help with training, and Wing IDE.
- Best Free Ide For Python 3
- Best Free Ide For Python Software
- Best Free Ide For Python Programming
- Best Free Ide For Python Data Science
- Best Free Ide For Python Django
Python is a general-purpose programming language for building anything; from backend web development, data analysis, artificial intelligence to scientific computing. It can also be used for developing productivity software, games, desktop apps and beyond.
It’s easy to learn, has a clean syntax and indentation structure. And an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) can, to some extend, determine ones programming experience when it comes to learning or developing using any language.
Read Also: 18 Best IDEs for Programmers and Developers
There are many Python IDEs out there, in this article, we will list 8 Best Python IDEs for Linux. Whether you’re new to programming or an experienced developer, we have you covered.
1. PyCharm
PyCharm is a powerful, cross-platform, highly customizable and pluggable Python IDE, which integrates all developments tools in one place. It is feature rich and comes in community (free and open source) as well as professional editions.
It provides smart code completion, code inspections functionalities and has remarkable error highlighting and quick-fixes. It also ships in with automated code refactoring and excellent navigation capabilities.
Has built-in developer tools such as integrated debugger and test runner; Python profiler; a built-in terminal; integration with major VCS and built-in database tools and much more. It is very popular among Python programmers and designed for professional developers.
2. Wing Python IDE
Wing Python IDE is a highly customizable and flexible, professional Python IDE with a powerful debugger and intelligent editor. It enables for interactive Python development in a fast, accurate, and fun manner.
Some of its well know features include extremely powerful debugging capabilities, code navigation, integrated unit testing, remote development, and so much more. If you love using Vim, then Wing amazingly binds with Vim editor.
Wing Python IDE
It has rich integration with App Engine, Django, PyQt, Flask, Vagrant and beyond. It supports project management and version control with Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, Subversion, and many others. It is also becoming popular among Python developers, and many users now prefer it to PyCharm.
3. Eric Python IDE
Eric is a featured-rich Python IDE, written in Python. It is based on the cross platform Qt UI toolkit, integrated with the highly flexible Scintilla editor control. It has unlimited number of editors.
It provides a configurable window layout, configurable syntax highlighting, source code auto-completion, source code call tips, source code folding, brace matching, error highlighting, and offers advanced search functionality including project wide search and replace.
Eric has an integrated class browser and web browser, integrated version control interface for Mercurial, Subversion and Git repositories as core plug-ins and so much more. One of its most important features, which lacks in many Python IDEs is an integrated source code documentation system.
4. PyDev For Eclipse
PyDev is an open source, feature-rich Python IDE for Eclipse. It supports Django integration, code completion, code completion with auto import, type hinting and code analysis.
Pydev Python IDE
It offers refactoring, a debugger, remote debugger, tokens browser, interactive console, unit test integration, code coverage and PyLint integration. It allows you to find references using (Ctrl+Shift+G) shortcut keys. You can use it for Python, Jython and IronPython development.
5. Spyders Scientific PYthon IDE
Spyder is a scientific Python IDE with many features for research, data analysis, and scientific package creation. It ships with a multi-language editor with function/class browser, code analysis features (with support for pyflakes and pylint), code completion, horizontal and vertical splitting as well as goto definition feature.
It has an interactive console, documentation viewer, variable explorer and a file explorer. Spyder allows for searching queries across multiple files in your project, with complete support for regular expressions.
6. Pyzo Python IDE
Pyzo is a simple, free and open-source IDE for Python. It employs conda, an OS-agnostic, system-level binary package manager and ecosystem. However, it works without any Python interpreter. It‘s main design goal is to be simple and highly interactive.
Pyzo Python IDE
It is made up of an editor, a shell, and a assortment of useful standard tools such as a file browser, source structure, logger and an interactive help feature to help the programmer in various ways. It offers full unicode support in both editor and shell. And you can choose between different Qt themes to use.
7. GNU Emacs For Python Programming
Emacs is a free, extensible, customizable and cross platform text editor. Emacs already has out-of-the-box Python support via “python-mode”. If you’re an Emacs fan, you can build a complete IDE for Python Programming by integrating the packages listed in Python Programming In Emacs guide in the Emacs wiki.
8. Vim Editor
Best Free Ide For Python 3
Vim is a popular, powerful, configurable and above all extensible text editor. It is fast and is often used as a Python development environment by many Linux users. To configure it as an IDE, you can start by using Python-mode, a plugin for developing Python applications in Vim.
Vim Editor
VIM can be a pain to configure especially for new users, but once you get through it, you will have a perfect match (i mean Vim and Python). There are several extensions that you can use to setup a full-fledged, professional IDE for Python. Refer to the Vim documentation and Python wiki for more information.
Summary
An IDE can make the difference between a good and bad programming experience. In this article, we shared 8 Best Python IDEs for Linux. Have we missed any, let us know via the comment from below. Also let us know which IDE you are using currently for Python programming.
Best IDE for Python
Read on for our detailed analysis of each IDE
Our first baby steps with Python, which typically involve making a 'Hello World' program and a couple of typos, don't require much in the way of specialist tools. It's fine to hammer out the code in a text editor, switch to a terminal, and then run it. When it doesn't work, you can return to the editor, fix the typos, then run it again.
However, as coding and testing becomes more complicated, involving multiple files and unit tests, these context switches become inefficient and frustrating. Life is easier when we can write, run and wrangle our code from the same place.
Exactly where a fancy text editor stops and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) begins is a fuzzy boundary. At a minimum, you'd want an application that: does syntax highlighting, code-folding and bracket-matching, has some awareness of the constituent source files of a project, and facilitates running the code (or part thereof). More advanced features might include code suggestions, a debugger, and integration with online repositories.
In this article we've picked five of our favorite IDEs, which are efforts that we feel give a good overview of what's on offer.
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1. Atom
An IDE that facilitates pretty much anything you can think of
Comprehensive package manager
Atom describes itself as a 'hackable text editor for the 21st Century'. It's maintained by social coding megalith GitHub, so as you'd expect it can do pretty much anything you can imagine. And if it can't, then someone's almost certainly working on a plugin to address that.
Atom has its own comprehensive package manager, and a huge community working on packages for it. As well as built-in Git and GitHub integration, Atom allows you to collaborate on coding projects in real-time via the Teletype package. Several thousand other packages are available, but Python coders looking for a more efficient workflow would do well to seek out a script package.
This offering is based on the electron framework, so Atom is cross-platform, but also has a not inconsiderable memory footprint. Coders who prefer their apps to be lightweight will balk at the 400MB (including its dependencies) install footprint and should look elsewhere. But even on a modest system it runs fine and all the functionality Atom provides means that it’s well worth the space investment.
Despite all its features, Atom has a clean interface and is much more beginner-friendly than you'd expect. The project view is helpful once you start to dabble with bigger projects and you are free to split the panels of the interface to suit your fancy.
2. IDLE
Python's very own minimal IDE that won’t get in your way
Powerful debugger
It's easy to overlook IDLE – Python's very own bespoke Integrated DeveLopment Environment. IDLE (named after Monty Python's Eric Idle) is fairly minimal compared to some of the other offerings around, but it has everything you need and certainly won't get in your way.
It’s coded in Python and uses the lightweight tkinter toolkit to draw its GUI. Starting IDLE will open a Python shell, just as you get when starting Python from the terminal. You can play around with code snippets here, with the bonus that keywords and output will be nicely colored.
Moving on from here you can open a new window to start coding proper. Your code will be appropriately highlighted and automatically indented, with a configurable indent level. IDLE supports using spaces or tabs for indentation, and can automagically convert between the two – plus it can indent multiple lines at a time.
IDLE lacks any project management facilities, but that’s no problem if your project spans only a handful of files. It has a powerful debugger which allows single-stepping through the code or over-stepping through each high level function. The debugger shows the call stack as well as the state of local and global variables.
3. Thonny
Comes as standard in new versions of Raspbian
Ideal for novices
Thonny is the least ‘developer-centric’ of all the IDEs we’ve highlighted here, but that doesn't mean it's any less powerful. It's developed at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and is itself written in Python. It features a powerful debugger that's great for learning the ins and outs of coding without worrying about how breakpoints work.
Best Free Ide For Python Software
The debugger can show you the state of variables as the program runs. It lets you take small or large steps through the program, which is great if you’re tracking down hard to find bugs. This is much better practice than – as beginners and seasoned coders alike are occasionally tempted to do – peppering your code with messy print() statements.
Thonny will automatically indent as you type, which is helpful for anyone new to Python since the language uses indentation to delineate functions, loops, classes, clauses, etc. It will autocomplete your code and provide bracket/parentheses matching. It will also helpfully highlight any syntax errors.
It would be ideal for beginners, but for the fact it's a little tricky to install if you're unfamiliar with Python packages and in particular pip (a package manager for Python). That said, it is included as standard in new versions of Raspbian and is well-suited to Raspberry Pi projects. It's just a shame that other distros don't include Thonny in their repos.
4. Visual Studio Code
Microsoft’s code editor is now a popular choice among devs
Impressive extensions marketplace
Once the nemesis of FOSS software, Microsoft has, under the stewardship of Satya Nadella, taken a much friendlier stance towards all things open source. The company may not be about to release the source code to Visual Studio, but in 2015 it did release a source code editor, Visual Studio Code – or Code for short – and open sourced the core of it. Code has since become rather popular amongst developers, and it's a fine choice for your Python projects too, once you've installed the Python extension, that is.
Best Free Ide For Python Programming
Code has its own debugger, supports linting, and has integration with all manner of source control tools. It has a built-in terminal too, and a well-stocked extensions marketplace (don't worry, they're free). It can also run and debug your project's unit tests through the unittest, pytest or nose frameworks.
If all this sounds a little too much, it also has a minimalist 'zen mode' which shows you only the file you're working on, hiding not just Code's interface, but the rest of your desktop too.
Code is highly configurable, and it has a settings panel that will delight those of a certain mind-set – each section unfolds the corresponding section of the settings.json file, all nicely highlighted of course.
Like Atom, code is an Electron app, so is cross-platform and a little bulky. Unlike Atom it has support for Intellisense, Microsoft's own take on code completion. For Python, as well as just suggesting completions, this also provides on-the-fly popups showing the documentation for classes and methods.
5. Eric
Powerful offering with support for real-time collaboration on code
Excellent support for Ruby, too
This powerful cross-platform IDE – which, like IDLE, is named after Eric Idle – is written in Python and uses the Qt library. Though Python is its focus, Eric (lowercase is the intended spelling) has excellent support for Ruby, and other languages too. It supports the bread and butter tasks we've come to expect: code folding, code completion, brace matching.
But there's so much more that you'll need to use its built-in (and automated) TODO list generation to keep track. It has an integrated class browser and powerful debugger, and thanks to being built-in Qt supports building GUIs via Qt Designer. The initial configuration screen may seem daunting, but most of it can be put off till later.
While the interface does look busy, there's no reason you can't use eric as a simple code (or even plaintext) editor. But it really comes into its own for more serious coding – there's even a built-in hex editor, SQL browser and icon designer. It supports unit tests and can debug both multithreaded and multiprocessing programs, which as anyone who dabbles in such things will testify, generate the worst kind of bugs.
It supports Mercurial and SVN version control natively, and Git support is available through a plugin. Like Code, there's support for real-time collaboration on code. In short, if you want a feature-rich Python powerhouse, eric is for you.
6. PyDev
The popular open source IDE
Best Free Ide For Python Data Science
Free
Best Free Ide For Python Django
Potential bloat
PyDev is the Python IDE that runs in Eclipse, which is already a very popular open source IDE for various programming languages, and is well-supported with a wide range of plugins to help add features.
PyDev itself comes with a range of useful coding features, such as code auto-completion, debugging, coding templates and analysis, as well as a browser for testing code.
There's also an integration option to work with the Django Python web framework, as well as offering support for Jython and IronPython development.
If there's a downside, it's that there's so much coding support made available that some users might find it somewhat bloated. However, it remains one of if not the most popular of the open source Python IDE's for exactly the same reason.
As it's open source, it's free to use, and easily provides enough features to support basic to intermediate programming. For more advanced programming, LiClipse is a paid-for tier that runs with Eclipse to offer more customized options.
More Python IDEs
Wing IDE 101 is a simple and free Python IDE intended to help new programmers get used to coding in Python. There are a number of resources to help with training, and Wing IDE 101 is available for download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
CodeSkulptor is a browser-based IDE for Python. The aim is to provide an easy to use platform for people new to Python to practice their programming skills. This makes it especially ideal for groups to use, as it means they will be using the same version and code editor, and this is made all the more helpful by users not having to download and install software directly.
PyScripter is an open source IDE that includes many of the basic required features, such as a syntax highlighting editor, integrated Python interpreter and debugger, project and file explorer, as well as the ability to customize and run a Python script externally.
PyCharm is a Python IDE for professional developers provided by JetBrains, so it's a paid-for program that costs $149 (£120) for a licence, with this dropping to $89 (£75) a year after three years. There's an impressive toolset included, such as intelligent assistance, web development frameworks, scientific tools, cross-technology development, and a huge collection of developer tools included.