[fjellfras]

Interesting that sublime text comes up. I have been looking for a "bells and whistles" sort of IDE for python for a few days now, I am traditionally a unix person so I have moved along nicely with both vim and emacs as needed, but at this point I need to work with a full featured IDE.

I am using the evaluation version of pycharm and I must say it is quite impressive, although paying for an editor does seem odd after using emacs for so many years but it is a well designed software and I think worth the price.

That said I have been asked to give sublime text a try and I must say it looks a lot better than pycharm, I think will give it a try next (it is certainly a lot cheaper and if I understand correctly has much wider language support than pycharm).

[Lewisham]

Sublime Text will never be a bells-and-whistles IDE like PyCharm or PyDev on Eclipse, it just won't work that way. The question is whether the extra niceities offered by those IDEs offer enough productivity gains over their heavyweight design which leads to them being clock-time slow to get things done (launching, navigating around files etc. etc.)

I think for experienced devs, a text editor is quicker for dynamic languages (less experienced people will get good mileage from an IDE). Go is sort of weird in that it reads like a dynamic language, so a text editor is Good Enough, while the static compiler helps to catch the sort of bugs that float up when you're doing manual (and hence, human-error-prone) refactoring work, like changing the type of something, which IDEs tend to automate for you before compile time. That's why GoSublime really is all you need for Go, as far as I can tell. (NOTE: I've not written anything like even a medium project in Go).

[fjellfras]

Since posting my comment about sublime text, I went ahead and downloaded and gave it a try. I must say it seems to fit my needs as far as python is concerned quite well, from the short time I spent with it.

It hits the sweet spot between emacs and pycharm quite nicely and I am at this point inclined to buy a license, I think an IDE is more useful for languages like java or scala but for python sublime text will do for me.

Re. the use cases for an IDE, my point was that as my side projects keep growing in size, I need something which is smart about things like refactoring, comprehensive autocomplete, support for debugging etc.