Turning Sublime Text into a Lightweight Python IDE

My path with Python IDEs has been:

- Visual Studio (when I was a student)

- Emacs (when I ceased to be a student)

- PyCharm (when my job paid for a license)

- Sublime Text (when I wanted something comparable to Emacs with some niceties thrown in and a single license cost)

All in all I think PyCharm is the most productive I have used. Minimal setup, the best code inspection I have used, nice integrations with things like git out of the box.

But Sublime Text has my heart at the moment because with the Emacs Pro package it has a very Emacs-y feel with almost identical key bindings (slight differences here and there). The package manager may be a bit "odd" and feel like a sidecar, but coming from Emacs...it feels pretty straightforward.

Sublime Text is also language agnostic so that's a plus.

At the moment I use PyCharm Professional for work and Sublime Text for personal stuff...and I think it strikes a good balance. Productivity where my requirements are strict and cost not a factor and flexibility where I like to try new things and recurring fees don't appeal.

Pycharms 2017 debugger (pydev), is much faster now. You meed to use python 3.6 though. The debugger window suggests to install some bindings. If you do that the debugger runs much much faster.

When Textmate stalled between versions for years on end, Sublime came in with Textmate compatibility and simply scooped up a huge userbase who wanted something like Textmate on other platforms or were tired of waiting on Textmate to release a new version. Sublime is a Textmate clone that outdid the thing it was cloning but worked with all the existing Textmate bundles. That's how.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I love Sublime Text. But it's also a real pain to get set up correctly. I want to like PyCharm . . . but it's also a real pain to get set up correctly, and it's slow as junk.

Then again there's straight up Visual Studio with Python tools, which is also a real pain in the ass to get set up and ready for use. And slower than I want it to be.

And vim, which is great when you get it going, but is also a huge pain in the ass to get set up.

Are we seeing a trend here?

I am. And the trend is that comprehensive IDEs really just take a lot more work with dynamically typed languages than they do with statically typed ones. Code introspection and completion is just a lot harder when you're guessing about stuff.

I don't know. I haven't found the sweet spot, and I prefer to spend my time getting things done instead of configuring tools.

My instinct is to choose the tools that are fast. Vim, Sublime Text. But fast has limitations. I have a pro license for PyCharm on my own dime, but I've always just given up when it comes to configuring it to something that makes sense.

Blargh.

This situation is a thing that makes me just a tiny little bit envious of the C# crowd. Visual Studio + Resharper is basically the best in class of coding tools. Yeah, you're going to spend some time with setup, and you are not going to edit shit on the fly on a server.

That tooling really works and works well. And SSMS is the gold standard for SQL IDEs. The open source Python part of me is incredibly jealous of the Microsoft tooling stack.

Some of the limitations with Python are by nature of the language, and some are because we just seem to be willing to settle for good enough.

But damn, I really miss Visual Studio environment when working with Python and Postgres instead of C# and SQL Server. I'm actually playing with C# and SQL Server for toy projects sometimes just because the tools are so good. If you happen to have a Windows box laying around. Which, you do, if you play any games.

PyCharm is the closest thing to that experience, but it's so gross, I just kind of can't stand it. Every time I sit down and decide, "Okay, I'm going to make this work for me. Today." I just give up. Fuck it. I'll just go back to vim and Sublime Text. They are good enough.

Yeah, it's a mess. For what it's worth though, it's a far sight better than ELPA in my experience. Though I stick mostly to JetBrains products because the experience is very nicely integrated.