[Edu-sig] Recommendation for editor+console or IDE for teaching beginners

[Vernon D. Cole]

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.
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