I still use PyCharm as my daily text editor.
IDEs like PyCharm have tons of features and the 80/20 rule applies: investing 20% effort learning the tool will get you 80% productivity. The rest is marginal gains and your effort is better spent thinking about your code.
Here, I'll enumerate the subset of functionality that I use.
Keyboard Shortcuts
- Cmd + O - Goto file or class
- Ctrl + G - Select the next matching text.
- Cmd + B - Jump to the definition or usages of a class, function, or variable.
- Cmd + X - Cut. Use this to delete a line of code.
- Cmd + C / Ctrl + V - Copy and paste
- Cmd + / - Toggle commenting.
- Tab / Shift + Tab - Increase or decrease the indentation level.
- Ctrl + R - Rerun the previous file, test, or command
- Ctrl + A - Jump to the start of the line
- Ctrl + E - Jump to the end of the line
GUI Features
You can use PyCharm to just edit text but that misses the point of an IDE.
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Refactor. PyCharm handles renaming and moving seamlessly. You don't need to go and find every instance a class or function is imported and rename it. Just use the tool once and it'll "just work" everywhere.
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Managing conda environments and keeping them sync with
requirements.txt. PyCharm will warn you if a package is outdated. If so, in the terminal tab I'll run
conda activate py39
pip install -r requirements.txt
I don't use PyCharm to manage Python environments.
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Running tests. You can run directory or file or individual tests. Very handy with the debugger.
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Run file in Python console. This runs the file and then leaves you with a Python prompt so you can interactively use the code you just wrote. I use IPython here.
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Markdown. PyCharm can render markdown files. There's a new table editor so you don't have to mess around with the
-- and |characters. -
Git I don't recommend using PyCharm for most git actions but it has a handy rollback button, a neat diff viewer between branches, and a nice tool to fix merge conflicts.
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Formatting. Don't bother making your code pretty. It can be any color you want as long as it's black.
Summary
What's the cost of this? The "Community Edition" is free and that's what I use. PyCharm Community Edition It's been around for a long time and I don't expect it to go anywhere.