Python IDEs

I’m considering trying an IDE for a change, rather than just gvim, because exploring options is good. I gather the top three IDEs that get mentioned in the context of Django are Wing, PyCharm, and Komodo (none of which are free), or Eclipse with PyDev (which is free, but has the even higher cost of being fucking Eclipse: I think using Eclipse is a much higher price to pay than money).

PyCharm, by the IntelliJ people, looks more full-featured than I knew any Python IDEs were. It’s really quite nice, and its code intelligence is impressive. The only obvious drawback is that it’s slow (is it because it’s written in Java? or just because it does so much introspection to provide such good hinting for so dynamic a language as Python?), which might or might not drive me crazy; and that when its code intelligence gets things wrong, it can be irritating. For example, it’s wonderful that it warns me if a variable is nowhere declared, but annoying when I know damn well that it gets injected by a decorator.

Wing IDE feels much lighter and faster. It has an impressively accurate vim input mode. (PyCharm also has vim emulation, need to try it.) It also feels like a more native application. In addition, when I open a Django project, the Django support is…I don’t know if it’s superior, but it’s more explicit: I get a Django menu with manage.py actions like validating models, generating SQL, and so on. Its code completion feels slightly more limited, though—import a symbol from a project-local module and PyCharm clearly knows more about it than Wing does.

Both Wing and PyCharm do Django; highlight a template reference in PyCharm and it will go to the template, for instance.

Komodo…I wonder why discussions on IDEs with support for Django mention Komodo. It looks like a great editor, it may even be a great generic IDE, but Django support? My brief search for making Komodo deal intelligently with Django revealed this amazing screencast which seems to conflate syntax highlighting support for Django for supporting Django with the IDE. No: Syntax highlighting is a feature a GUI text editor can have. For an IDE to support a library should mean more. For example, if I open a Django project, it might at least have the decency to figure out what running it should mean (hint: not running the module I’m currently editing). Since it doesn’t do this right off the bat, nor make it trivially discoverable, I infer that even if there exist better Django integration features, it’s so far off the priority radar that I can not only discount Komodo as an option, but reiterate my surprise that it even gets brought up.

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Currently I’m leaning toward PyCharm as the top choice, but feeling vaguely guilty about it.