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Palo Alto, California
First elected president and co-founder of Tokyo Linux Users Group. Co-author of "Linux Japanese Environment" book published by O'Reilly Japan. Part of core team that established first ISP in Asia. Former VP of product management and product marketing for major Linux company. Partner at Oppkey, developer relations consulting firm in Silicon Valley.
Authored Comments
I have a commercial license for PyCharm professional and also bought a license for my teenage son. We both used it for years. He bought a license for Sublime and I started to use Atom. The rate of development with Atom and the plug-ins are pretty amazing. I still use vi every day for small tasks and have used Emacs for 20 years (I'm old). I didn't think that I would like Atom, but the ease of adding plugins is really cool. Syntax highlighting, checking, git integration, code completion, are all very nice. It seems easier to avoid using the mouse in Atom compared to PyCharm.
This said, I just realized that I've only been working on small code projects recently. As I'm writing this, I'm now wondering if there's a certain size of project where PyCharm advantages start to shine. There's probably a certain number of modules and files, where each editor is preferred.
Example:
vi: config files, single file projects, shorter files under a few lines of code
atom: small number of files with each file up to a thousand lines
pycharm: a dozen or more files
I'm currently using and liking Geany. I like the speed and the light resource use. If's very snappy. Geany is generally an amazing IDE, it's underrated.
This said, I do feel that the lightweight and high performance aspects of an editor or IDE are important for some people, but not for all.
In my case, the main reason I started using Geany is because I was teaching a young child to program on the Raspberry Pi using X Display Forwarding over ssh to display the IDE to another Linux box. I had concerns that the child (10 years old) would get confused with vi or even with Emacs in a console. Even using Emacs with X Display forwarding didn't seem like the right thing to do since the Emacs keybindings are falling out of favor (I'ved used Emacs for two decades and admit this grudgingly). I tried NinjaIDE, but the performance over ssh with X forwarding was not good (from the Raspberry Pi).
Previously, my daughter had been using PyCharm Professional, but two months ago had moved to Atom, as the interface was less cluttered and thus less confusing in some ways. My son, her brother, went rogue and moved to Sublime. He likes the speed. He's young. All his teenage friends use Sublime. I think they like the speed. He seems to give Atom the nod as far as UI, but likes the speed of sublime.
When my daughter isn't working on the Raspberry Pi, her main workstation is pretty peppy. It has 30GB of RAM, 4.5Ghz quad-core i5, fast SSD disks. The performance of most IDEs is fine on the main system and not a consideration at her level.
While IDE resource consumption is important, it is more important to some people and also more important depending on usage (like network use) or equipment (like running on a low resource Raspberry Pi).