Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and Editors

Why use an IDE?

When editing source code, it is recommended to use an editor that supports features specific to software development, such as syntax highlighting, command completion, linting, etc. You will probably want to work in a nice graphical editor for most development, but you should also be familiar with a command-line editor for working in the terminal. The following isn't an exhaustive list, but represents some software that Alon and/or Fuller can help you with.

Graphical IDEs

Since we are (almost) exclusively programming in Python and on Linux systems (predominantly Ubuntu), here are some recommendations:

PyCharm

This is Alon's recommendation / editor of choice. The easiest installation method on Ubuntu is as a snap.

Atom

Atom is a general-purpose integrated development environment (IDE) which includes git integration and is developed by GitHub. You can download the package for Ubuntu systems here. Save the package somewhere convenient (e.g. ~/Downloads) and then open a terminal and navigate to that location. Install the local package with sudo dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb

VS Codium

VS Codium is a full open-source binary of the popular Microsoft Visual Studio Code IDE, which is another extensible, general-purpose IDE, like Atom. Installation instructions on available at the link, above. Installation of a Python development environment is straight-forward. Like Atom, it has built-in integration with git for version control and source management. If you do want the tracking/reporting and integration available with Microsoft products, you can get the official VS Code build.

Command Line Editors

Nano

Nano is a very easy editor which should be installed by default. If not, you can install it on Ubuntu with sudo apt install nano.

Vim

Vim has a steep learning curve, but is extensible and powerful. It is worth learning if you need to regularly edit multiple files in a terminal. You may install it with sudo apt install vim. To get an introduction to the editor, run vimtutor in a terminal to launch the tutorials. For a great post on what makes vim different from just another text editor (and why you should consider it) see this post.