Kinda liking PyCharm

I’ve been tinkering around with IDEs for a while.  It’s hard to justify it…every time I try, I spend a tremendous amount of time using the hoped-for new tool, using it for real, only to eventually find the fatal flaws.  Then it’s back to Emacs with a dozen flowers, a box of chocolates, and the hangdog expression that says “Sorry I set my eyes on another.”

This has happened for Pydev/Eclipse, Aptana, Textmate, and Komodo.  Each brought down by some level of (a) horrible performance on OS X, (b) extreme amount of tinkering to get something working such as indentation, or (c) a realization that the cost (Komodo) meant I’d be the only one I know using.

Thought I’d give PyCharm a try.  It’s based on a larger IDE project so it automatically gains a lot of features, such as really good HTML and Javascript support.  Getting it working with virtualenv and buildout wasn’t excruciating, in fact, the added specific support for it.  And the performance was pretty good.  Considering I still can’t get decent Javascript indentation, even after manual help from others, it was a good sign.

Last week my trial run ran out.  I could have chintzed by asking them for an open source license.  But I plopped down the modest cost, expecting that I would find the fatal flaw about 10 minutes after the credit card charge cleared.

But today I looked at my screen and realized…damn, I’m pretty happy.  Still scratching the surface.  When they add reST/Sphinx support later this year, I’ll be even happier.  Maybe happy enough to put out a bounty for Chameleon/Pyramid support.