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Activestate seems to have lost its way with Komodo – their scripting language IDE.  It used to be a fast, light, and highly usable IDE that made debugging easy.   They went off the rails with version 8- it was mostly a UI re-skin with very unstable code, it crashed frequently, froze when opening certain files, and had extremely slow network access.  I called it the ‘so what?’ release.  They fixed most of these issues in rev 8.5 but the high memory usage still remains.  What soured me was paying for a full version upgrade for what was mostly a buggy UI update.

Lately, I’ve been getting into Python and I’ve discovered JetBrains’ free Python IDE – PyCharm.  JetBrains has a moderately priced paid version but what is amazing is that the free version of PyCharm includes a Python debugger.  Compare this to Activestate’s free Komodo Edit which does not include a debugger of any sort.

Plus, the paid version of PyCharm includes subscriptions and upgrades for 1 year.  Activestate requires you to pay $87 in addition to the price you pay for Komodo for a 1 year subscription.

Besides all the price gouging, I’ve found that the free version of PyCharm is a much better Python editor than Komodo.

Here are some great features in PyCharm that are not in Activestate’s Komodo:

Multiple debug sessions.  Want to debug two scripts at the same time?  You can do that with PyCharm.

Typing in the file window highlights all files that match any of the characters.  Komodo only goes to the first match and that is only if you type really fast.  Otherwise it will skip around.

Dropdowns for everything.  PyCharm dropdowns are almost as good as Visual Studio.  In PyCharm I can define a variable as a list/string/dictionary and every time after that I’ll get all associated methods when I type in the period after the variable.  Importing a module?  You’ll get dropdowns for all the module members.

Built-in Python package manager, built-in TODO manager, built-in windows cmd console manager (it even lets you have multiple sessions open), and even a built-in repository browser!

A little lightbulb (similar to ReSharper) pops up when there is an error or the code can be improved in some way.  Clicking on it shows a list of things it can do to fix or improve the code.  It makes the changes for you!

 If you are a Komodo Python user, then try PyCharm.  You will be pleasantly surprised.