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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

and VS is no IDEA, which also has Python support!

You mean IntelliJIDEA, right? That intellisense is really nice, I loved it when I saw it VS too. Get a kick out of Java devs who think it's new.

Sorry, not trying to bust on you, but I write in all these IDEs...I still love VS.

But hey, C# is just a copy of Java, so maybe it evens out.

I haven't used IntelliJIDEA, but I do use Jetbrains' Resharper, which transforms VS into a much better IDE. If that's anything to go by, IntelliJIDEA's intellisense will be better than VS's intellisense.

Having said that, I just watched the screencast[1] of Python intellisense in VS, very impressive.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CoGsSlrxKk

IDEA's Python support seems very poor compared to VS. I installed the IDEA Python plugin and when I typed "import " it said "no suggestions". Same thing when I typed "sys." and when I created a new Python project, it couldn't find any interpreters installed on my system.

Meanwhile in VS, after installing the Python plugin all of that stuff just worked the first time.

When you start up a new Pycharm project or add a new interpreter, you have to let the index processes run (there's an indicator in the lower toolbar which will tell you when background processes are running...click it). When those index processes are finished, Pycharm will definitely autocomplete import statements: http://imgur.com/JRsfH

To be fair, you have to do the same for PTVS, and we dont' have such a nice UI to tell you the index processes are running.

I configured an interpreter and things started working in IDEA (I don't have PyCharm).

However, my assessment remains the same because now that autocomplete is finally working, it's still not as good as VS in my opinion.

1) VS shows documentation for each function in the autocomplete list. (Seen here http://i.imgur.com/wQpZZ.png ) IDEA does not.

2) VS shows type information where possible. IDEA does not.

3) VS shows the autocomplete list immediately after I type the space in "import ". With IDEA I have to hit Ctrl+Space to get the list.

4) The VS Python plugin worked with zero configuration. I had to configure an interpreter for IDEA and then wait a while for it to index everything.

What version of IDEA do you have? The latest version 10.5 works with the new version of the python plugin (which is basicaly pycharm) and auto completes right away when you start typing.

I really don't like having to configure the interpreters but it's also nice when you're using project based virtual environments.

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