I have written few articles about how Sublime Text has been such a great environment to get my work done—and there’s more to come, I have been extremely happy with Sublime for years.
But listening to Michael Kennedy and some guests on his Talk Python to Me podcast gush about PyCharm’s great features made me wonder what I was missing. I was lucky to receive a trial license for PyCharm almost a year ago, but I found it opaque and harsh compared to my beloved Sublime.
With my license ending soon and a couple new python projects at work, I thought I would invest some effort to get used to PyCharm and see if I could get any benefit from it.
TFW you start to prefer PyCharm over Sublime Text.
— Chris May (@_ChrisMay) September 13, 2016
Didn't think this day would come.
What I’m finding useful
- Much “smarter” auto-completion
- Debugging python code
- The built-in functionality for web development, including Emmet, gulp
- Built-in diff viewer
- Integration with prominent frameworks, including Django
- Very configurable test runner
What I’m finding painful
- No auto-wrapping of parentheses, strings, or other brackets.
- No command bar.
- The inability to increment values by one, 10, or 0.1
- The environment still feels very opaque, confusing, and frustrating.
Which should I use?
It all depends on your workload. I am still going to use both. If I’m doing anything that’s python-centric, chances are you’ll find me in PyCharm. But If I need to quickly open and edit a file, Sublime will still be my go-to editor.
As for you, I plan on sharing thoughts that I hope will help in the coming months. The talk I’ve been preparing for my local python group is nearly complete, and that will allow more time for my writing.
If you have anything you’d like addressed, please let me know!