Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now? | Not Hacker News!

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Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

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

PyCharmIDE alternativesJetBrains

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

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4 months ago

3 replies

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

4 months ago

1 reply

What does neovim often over a standard vim?

4 months ago

1 reply

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

4 months ago

Bram died 2 years ago (already(!!!), time flies!), so it's not so recently...

Also the community does an incredible job and it's quite active with further development and improvements, especially in improving the Vim9 script engine among many things they work on.

If you don't believe me, just see for yourself https://github.com/vim/vim/commits/master/

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

4 months ago

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

4 months ago

Agree! Bit of a steep learning curve in the beginning but once you get over that, it is a very productive coding environment. Check out the Neovim distros (e.g., LazyVim, NvChad) to get up and running quickly.

4 months ago

1 reply

I'm happy with VS Code.

4 months ago

Me too, including integration with GitHub Copilot

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

4 months ago

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.

4 months ago

1 reply

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 found something as good as Pycharm’s Git integration.

4 months ago

1 reply

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!

4 months ago

Yeah, even to just know what's up it's probably important to try.

If switching between multiple editors you should look to include a .editorconfig file in your project to have 1 place to configure things.[1]

The following are the extensions I've found to use in VSCode / Cursor (these can be saved to / recommended to a project by being listed in the `.vscode/extensions.json` file).

* [2] Ruff

* [3] BasedPyright

* [4] Todo Tree

* [5] Rainbow CSV

* [6] Mermaid Chart (I’ve found Claude to be good at generating these)

* [7] Live Share

* [8] Even Better TOML

* [9] Error Lens

[1] https://editorconfig.org/ [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=charlier... [3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=detachhe... [4] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Gruntfug... [5] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mechatro... [6] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MermaidC... [7] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv... [8] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tamasfe.... [9] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=username...

4 months ago

1 reply

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.

4 months ago

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.

4 months ago

So I understand - you're canceling the subscription because they advertised a product they sell?

Pycharm is the best.

4 months ago

PyScripter. It's a native Windows executable, should be significantly slicker and faster compared to Java or Electron based bloatware. It seems to be quite feature-full as well.

4 months ago

https://zed.dev/

4 months ago

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

4 months ago

Wing IDE is performant and I enjoy using it.

I have licenses for both Wing and PyCharm

4 months ago

VSCode here.

4 months ago

VS Code has the second best lsp for Python (it’s proprietary), there is open source version of it as well with less features.

The problem with other editors is the lack of good and fast lsp. Pycharm’s lsp is so head of everyone.

In VS Code and other editors the lsp for Python is written in JavaScript which is hilarious.