Farewell PyCharm! Going VIM again

A few months ago, we started working with git. It turned out that ECLIPSE with PyDev is a real mess to learn with GIT. I talked about it with a friend, and he suggested that we try PyCharm. I had my doubts, that we could migrate from SVN to GIT and simultaneously to PyCharm from PyDev.

Never the less, I gave PyCharm a spin, and I found it surprisingly straight forward. There are no complicated workspaces and views to learn when working with GIT. Everything else, like introspection, and project management is really a breeze when comparing to PyDev. Even the debugger is really nice to work with.

What was really weired for me, but really easy for my team, was that PyCharm tries to make working with git similar to working with Subversion. It really does work for people who com with long SVN history.

However, as my colleagues started to become more convenient with GIT, it turned out that PyCharm's intensive caching is really not playing well with git, if you start working with git directly through a terminal.

Here is where I am partly fault. While I tried to learn the PyCharm interface, I always found that I am faster to cherry-pick or merge or do any git action on the shell. So, even when I was sitting with colleagues to do some peer working on our Software I was showing them the underlying git command.

Slowly, they started also to get annoyed with the fact that PyCharm's interface to git is a bit cumbersome, and that git's awesome command completing and ability to share git alias and .config files is simply faster and easier.

So now, that everyone is feeling comfortable working with git on the shell, I no longer feel obligated to work with PyCharm and learn it, so I could help my colleagues. Hence, I am back to VIM, and the best interface to git after git commands on the shell is vim-fugitive if you don't know vim fugitive, watch these bunch of screencasts linked in vim-fugitive's home-page.

To sum it up, I really found PyCharm better then PyDev, because it easier to understand and to work with. It's Version Control interface, is a bless for SVN new comers for git, but at the same time it is very limiting for people who really know git. It really helped us migrating to git, but when things became more complicated we ended up working with git in the shell, until we really didn't need or want to use PyCharm's Version Control interface. May be Jetbrains should consider enabling git power users turning off this SVN compatibility. For me, it's already too late. I am back to VIM.

And finally, I am a big fan of the solarized color theme. I really missed it in PyCharm -But I also found PyCharm's darcula color theme really pleasant. Changing from PyCharm to VIM a couple of times a day looking at text with different themes was an eye irritating experience. Hence, I changed my default color theme in VIM to darcula-vim, and I don't really miss solarized ...

This entry was tagged: python, vim, git

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