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Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

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Re: Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

#11

Post by blibble »

I was also willing to pay to support a company that produced software I liked, worked well, and treated me as a valued customer

so when it advertised AI to me I immediately cancelled my very expensive corporate all products ultimate subscription

just using community for now

Re: Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

#14

Post by lordkrandel »

ipaddr wrote: post #13
lordkrandel wrote: post #2

Neovim, simple answer. No subscriptions, no ads, fast, free forever. Have a look at the integrations.

What does neovim often over a standard vim?

Vim's creator has recently died. He was the creayor and almost solo developer. Neovim has Lua scripting and a vibrant dev community.

Re: Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

#15

Post by idontwantthis »

lordkrandel wrote: post #2

Neovim, simple answer. No subscriptions, no ads, fast, free forever. Have a look at the integrations.

I tried Vim and Neovim seriously for years. Eventually got fed up with plugins randomly breaking, and memory leaks requiring me to restart the editor multiple times per day.

I still use it for pure editing, but doing stuff like debugging and running tests I just don’t want to put up with it anymore and Jetbrains never breaks.

Re: Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

#17

Post by jmward01 »

bengt wrote: post #9

My hunch is VSCode or more likely Cursor. I’ve spent some time this summer trying to get IDE independent tooling running and have settled on Ruff + basedpyright. Also switched over to using UV. You may want to look into Astral’s TY or facebook’s rust based Pyrefly if keen to alpha / beta test. I found getting VSCode properly set up and figuring out what extensions were needed a real pain in the ass and have never fou…

I think I need to try Cursor. I have held off but the world is changing fast and jumping into a more code assistant first approach may be a good answer. The thing that is driving me crazy in this world though is the 'tab tab tab' view that these approaches have. It is hard enough when predictive text tries to finish the word I am typing much less a whole sentence or code block. It is very hard to think freely when something is whispering in your ear what you should say next.

I am very hesitant to look at VSCode. I have strong push back against Microsoft related tools (related, best alternative to GitHub?) That is mostly on principle now though. I have avoided them so long that I can't honestly comment on their quality anymore. Everything Microsoft though long term seem so to...degrade. It does it in a way that when you finally realize you hate the tool you also realize you should have jumped 2 years ago. They are so good at finding the line where it is just good enough and just barely keeping you there, but not clearly above it.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Re: Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

#18

Post by jmward01 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #8

I'm so incredibly disappointed at how quickly JetBrains is enshittifying what used to be the best set of IDEs available. I paid for the all products pack for nearly ten years. I gave up a while ago and I'm just stuck using my fallback licenses for the 2024.1 builds, which are IMO the last usable versions.

I totally preferred the 2024 stuff but it wasn't able to use 3.13+ which is a deal breaker. 2025 has been a horrible experience all around. Their filesystem change detection is broken, debug in async has basically stopped working and the rework of the menus and the git integration nearly made me fallback to 2024 and accept that it could barely use 3.13 venvs. I liked their product. I don't know what is happening but it seems like they have been going in the wrong direction.

Re: Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

#19

Post by jmward01 »

grep_it wrote: post #16

I still use pycharm, but these days I satisfy my debugging with pudb ( https://pypi.org/project/pudb/ ) which has been amazing and a good middle ground for the integrated debugger feel.

I really like a good IDE. I may try this but the all in one world is what I work best in. I'll give this a look though. I am always willing to try something not in my comfort zone.

Re: Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

#20

Post by lordkrandel »

idontwantthis wrote: post #15
lordkrandel wrote: post #2

Neovim, simple answer. No subscriptions, no ads, fast, free forever. Have a look at the integrations.

I tried Vim and Neovim seriously for years. Eventually got fed up with plugins randomly breaking, and memory leaks requiring me to restart the editor multiple times per day. I still use it for pure editing, but doing stuff like debugging and running tests I just don’t want to put up with it anymore and Jetbrains never breaks.

I don't use many plugins, not "fancy" ones. It never breaks, and it's certainly without ads, indexing, subscriptions, logins, enterprise policies ...
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