I second the suggestion to use PyCharm. I have been using it commercially (and almost exclusively) for two years. The free version is very capable for any normal desktop projects, and the professional version is free for educational institutions or students. If has a few bad habits (mostly inherited from the fact that it is written in Java) but the many good things about it far outweigh them. Built-in support for hard to learn but easy to use features like Python virtual environments and pip downloads makes it a real winner. The integrated debugger is quite good, and it operates almost identically in both Windows and Linux. Similarly, I have been using git (and GitHub) for the same two years. GitHub is great, and almost makes up for the terrible faults in git. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend starting students out using Bitbucket and Mercurial, for the same reasons that you are teaching Python rather than C++. It is so much easier to learn. They can transfer learning to Git if and when they are forced to. Both git and hg are well supported by PyCharm.