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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

PyCharm is a no-nonsense, straightforward IDE, that's a pleasure to use. They somehow manage to avoid annoying feature bloat and crapware. No nagging, no bullshit, they are actually creating features that improve workflows instead of features to tick boxes on corporate purchasing department meeting room flipcharts or buzzword bingo. Remarkable and I really hope they don't get bought-and-killed by one of the giants. Or VCs wanting to "make it more $marketing_buzzword".

I've used NetBeans, Eclipse, Visual Studio, QtCreator etc. over the years and always used to pull my hair out over the mess. JetBrains IDEs are way ahead in UX, usability and working day-to-day, minute-to-minute. Nothing flashy, nothing overly marketed, just rock solid and great value.

Free educational license, no-brainer update management with the JetBrains toolbox, everything fits, doesn't demand attention to itself and lets you concentrate on the work.

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I'm a big fan and user of PyCharm for many years, but we all know that when my fan starts going and the laptop wants to take off, we can guarantee that PyCharm is indexing ;)

Sure there are some places to improve.

My only complaint is with the remote features, now with covid. I want to seamlessly work as if I was sitting in the office (I can ssh to the machine).

My current setup is to sshfs mount my remote code, install a conda env on my laptop mirroring the office one, and execute things in a terminal window. PyCharm then becomes an editor, autocompleter, refactoring tool, code navigation tool etc, but I don't do debugging within it.

There is some SSH and remote interpreter options but it's limited and hard to use. You can't directly work on the remote files, it uses a model of publishing your changes to the remote and keeps multiple copies etc. Several of us spent quite some time trying to come up with a good workflows for this but some rather use remote desktops or X forwarding because it's not straightforward.

They seem to releasing Code With Me soon (it's currently in EAP, I understood it should come with 2020.3). I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like it could be used a bit like VS Code's remote development mode. It does have some restrictions, but hopefully those will end up being fixed (e.g. currently you need to accept the sessions via GUI instead of being able to let it do automatically via SSH & some tool windows don't work thru it (like Maven)).

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/14896-code-with-me

Code with me works really well. i was impressed.

In my team we have actually managed to have it working like I am in the office, but with a VPN.

With the remote interpreter, we use Docker, I can debug code that is running on our servers.

And if you set up deployment any changes on your files are automatically uploaded to the remote files, without multiple copies it just overwrites them.

Its a pleasure to work with, I can debug GPU-cuda issues on my macbook with PyCharm GUI!! It was a little bit convoluted to set up, we followed this guide: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-33489

My workflow now involves running syncthing to synchronize repos between local and remote server and then run instances of IntelliJ locally and over VNC. I get the speed of local editing and running unit tests, but can switch over to VNC remote instance to run and debug. VNC has been much more performant and easier to use than X forwarding or remote debugging.

There is stuff like projector that lets you make a remote machine a dev machine that does all the building, indexing, etc. Have a beefy 80 core machine be your dev machine while you work on your lightweight laptop, or have it live in the data center so debugging connections are not so 'remote', etc.

https://github.com/JetBrains/projector-docker

That’s their one thing...

Indexing is required by so much of their software, even listening for XDebug connections with PHPStorm is not available while indexing. Can’t they let us set the indexing on a lower priority and let stuff work without the index too? (Even if we can’t jump to a specific function, XDebug protocol already has the file and line indicated.)

Otherwise I love their software!

Agreed a more progressive indexing would be nice. A bit like a progressive jpeg.

PyCharm is fine for me. IntelliJ, on the other hand, will periodically freeze my work Macbook when trying to reindex parts of our monorepo[1]. Makes me wish I wasn't forced to use a laptop... or a monorepo.

[1] Note, just a handful of top-level targets comprising 2%-3% of the whole repo. Indexing the entire monorepo at once is a non-starter.

This sounds very debuggable - PyCharm is basically the same product as IntelliJ + Python plugin. There's no difference in how it handles project indexing, so it's probably a specific IntelliJ plugin or functionality causing the freezes.

There's a built-in CPU profiler, but given that you're a paying customer, just contact their support and they'll help you figure it out.

The freezes might be caused by IntelliJ's jvm running out of memory. Go to the help menu and then Memory Settings (it's not in the normal settings)

That and laggy keystrokes are really a productivity killer, but maybe for some people it's a worthwhile tradeoff. Not for me. I'm of the opinion that tools should get out of the way and be almost invisible.

Interestingly thats what intellij is for me. RAM is cheap, give a bit more to the editor and it will not get in the way. Indexing saves me so much time that it payed for the extra GBs the first week of use.

Find the biggest directory in your project which doesn't contain relevant code (usually /build, /docs, /.git or /thirdparty) and right click: mark as excluded. Problem solved.

I've used Jetbrains products for five years. Updates are consistently an improvement. Even performance improvements from time to time, which is fantastic since it is a heavy java application. They were quick on the take with Docker integration, latest Cmake updates, even some Go2 generics support already.

Same with WebStorm editing JavaScript & TypeScript!

I'm so impressed that JetBrains can put a reliable pseudo-type system on top of dynamic languages like Python and JavaScript.

My co-workers wonder why I don't just use VSCode like everybody else. I mean it's not _bad_, but it's not JetBrains. You will have to pry my all-tools JetBrains license out of my cold dead hands.

Shoutout for RubyMine, Goland and Pycharm - all excellent and reliable.

If you're going to use more than 3 of their offerings, it starts to get cheaper going with the all products pack or IntelliJ ultimate is cheaper than going with 2 tools. But you should note that IntelliJ doesn't include every other products as plugins such as AppCode.

fantastic application for education as well. The debugger has been a very full featured and useful tool for teaching.

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