About IDEs in General

What is an IDE?

IDE i.e. Integrated Development Environment is a software application that provides facilities for software development. IDE includes normally at least an editor to write code, build automation tools, and a debugger. Some other possible features are an integrated version control, a class browser, and an object browser.

In this guide we will install and use PyCharm Community Edition by Jetbrains, but below are some other IDEs and what they are useful for.

Other IDEs

• Spyder is especially suitable for data analysis and scientific computation. User interface is similar to Matlab.
• Thonny – is an IDE aimed at beginners, and its main strength is ease of use.
• Visual Studio Code – an IDE developed by Microsoft. Its features include and integrated Git version control.
• Eclipse – originally an IDE for Java programming, but works also with Python if PyDev plugin is installed.

It is also possible to use a text editor such as Atom, and install Python build tools as a plugin. However this isn’t in the scope of this guide.