PyCharm and Sublime Text

[Dana]

Hey gang,

I was on the the bc_geopython site recently and noticed Kevin's post on PyCharm. I started using it in the past few months and it works well for writing and running scripts. There are a few things that are strange (like trying to delete a project). You need to close the project from the file menu then delete it from the source. No biggie though. Easy to work around. If you use eclipse then using PyCharm is not a problem as the interface is similar and fairly intuitive (like most IDEs - i've also been playing with NetBeans but not great for  Python). I still mainly use Eclipse but I'm playing with PyCharm once in awhile to see which I like best. It seems to be faster than Eclipse but I have no benchmark for that.

I also recently discovered that Sublime Text (my favorite text editor) has a plugin called 'sublimerepl'. Once REPL is launched it allows the user to select from about 30 different programming languages. Python is the only one we really care about in this case though.

Launching the REPL starts an interactive REPL in sublime-text itself. Pretty nifty. The best part is that there's commands at the top of that menu to eval or transfer your current file (or selection) to the repl you've already launched. This means you can re-eval the file you're working on without having to restart the python interpreter. No more waiting for ArcPy to import every time you 'run module' your script...

To make it work with ArcGIS's python you need to add the 'C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.2\' directory to your 'path' environment variable.

In addition to these new discoveries I found PIP (for installing and managing python packages to help you save valuable time) and IPython Notebook. Quoting from the IPython site directly: "The IPython Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment where you can combine code execution, text, mathematics, plots and rich media into a single document." And anything you create can be shared with other colleagues.

Just wanted to share some cool new python stuff I've discovered in the past few months.

Dana

[Dana]

An update:

I've abandoned Eclipse for home use all together. Unfortunately PyCharm can't be used on the GTS but I prefer it's functionality over Eclipse now and it's easy integration with version control system. Eclipse is very versatile and free. However it's a pretty massive for simple python programming and requires plugin after plugin to work the way one wants it too.

Another thing I recently discovered about PyCharm is that it can be used for development with QGIS and creating a batch file to have it recognize QGIS is all that is needed and it's ready to go.

Basically PyCharm works straight out of the box for strict python/Django programming which is most of what I play with outside of work with exception to Javascript which also works in PyCharm and is the only required plugin I currently use with PyCharm. PyCharm would be my choice hands down if spending money on an enterprise license was an option.

Jetbrains, the company behind PyCharm, makes a fantastic product. Try it out. They have a 30 day trial.