2021-12-01
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Oyinkansola Awosan
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Dec 1, 2021 â‹… 4 min read

PyCharm vs. VS Code: Choosing the best Python IDE

Oyinkansola Awosan I'm a fun techie and passionate technical writer interested in data science, machine learning, cloud engineering, and blockchain technologies.

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7 Replies to "PyCharm vs. VS Code: Choosing the best Python IDE"

  1. Sorry but this comparision is rather biased towards VS Code – basically all the PROs for VS Code are already included in the Community Version of Pycharm (Bug-List, Terminals, GIT Terminal, Remote Hosts via SSH, Code Inspecition, Linting and Highlighting) and fully featured PROs of PyCharm are not mentioned (Debuggig, Debugging-Symbols, Runtime Environments, Venv support ouf of the box, Unit-Testing Integration and much more).

  2. Really nice and thanks! I’m not fan of both but agree with Hanspeter, bash shell also included in PyCharm. PyCharm would be the best, it allows you use Python shell during debug, can remind you missed python package, and user can install python, its packages, git all in the IDE. The main draw back of vs code (I really hope it is the only IDE as I also use C/C++) is: too often or arbitrarily updates with bugs, user needs to find his own solution on how to use it – often in change. I want use a tool not spend much time on the tool.

  3. “PyCharm took about three to five minutes to load and open on my machine”

    I’ve never met another software developer who had a computer that took 3-5 minutes to load PyCharm or any JetBrains tools, to the point I seriously doubt the veracity of that statement. For me, PyCharm loads an existing project (from zero to “able to start writing code”) in 12 seconds. VSCode does load much faster, but we’re talking about a single-digit difference and I don’t typically open and close my IDE many times during a work day.

    It has a terminal emulator like VSCode (should be said VSCode has a terminal emulator like PyCharm since Jetbrains had this before VSCode existed). PyCharm also has a Python IDLE terminal that is automatically started in the context of the project’s virtual environment, and includes a visual debugger to inspect state of objects, which VSCode doesn’t have.

    The visual debugger in PyCharm is leaps-and-bounds better than the one in VSCode.

    As Thomas Ahle mentioned in comments here, the refactoring support in PyCharm is incredible. I can quickly rename variables, classes, methods, etc. throughout an entire file or a whole project in seconds.

    The built-in framework support in PyCharm is also excellent. If you use things like Flask, Django, FastAPI, Pyramid, or full-stack frontend things like Vue.js, React, etc. you will really like that. The database and Docker integrations are also excellent. I’ve never used that in VSCode so I can’t speak for how well that works there.

    End of the day, VSCode is a code editor, not a fully featured development environment tailored specifically to Python development workflows. I use both VSCode and PyCharm, but when working on a big project I only use PyCharm. The main benefit of VSCode is it’s small and lightweight for very small projects or single-file editing and is free. But if you spend 8 hours a day being paid to work on (or review) code for complex projects then you want PyCharm or Jetbrains Ultimate for large polyglot stuff.

    After the third year, PyCharm costs me $53 a year, which for a lot of developers is less than an hour of work. I feel that is a more than fair trade-off for what you get.

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