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Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

23 points by jmward01 ↗ HN
I was just using PyCharm, which I have paid for and used for many years now, and and an ad for their 'Cadence' product came up in the IDE as a notification. I have now canceled my subscription and am looking for a good alternative. The majority of work I do is with python and I'm looking for solid step trace debugging and something that integrates reasonably well with Claude Code and other tools like it. Above all else though I am looking for something that won't advertise to me. I am willing to pay, I like supporting software I use, so what should I be looking for in the age of Claude code, Windsurf and the like?

14 comments

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lordkrandel
Neovim, simple answer. No subscriptions, no ads, fast, free forever. Have a look at the integrations.
ipaddr
What does neovim often over a standard vim?
idontwantthis
I tried Vim and Neovim seriously for years. Eventually got fed up with plugins randomly breaking, and memory leaks requiring me to restart the editor multiple times per day.

I still use it for pure editing, but doing stuff like debugging and running tests I just don’t want to put up with it anymore and Jetbrains never breaks.

f311a
VS Code has the second best lsp for Python (it’s proprietary), there is open source version of it as well with less features.

The problem with other editors is the lack of good and fast lsp. Pycharm’s lsp is so head of everyone.

In VS Code and other editors the lsp for Python is written in JavaScript which is hilarious.

estimator7292
I'm so incredibly disappointed at how quickly JetBrains is enshittifying what used to be the best set of IDEs available.

I paid for the all products pack for nearly ten years. I gave up a while ago and I'm just stuck using my fallback licenses for the 2024.1 builds, which are IMO the last usable versions.

bengt
My hunch is VSCode or more likely Cursor. I’ve spent some time this summer trying to get IDE independent tooling running and have settled on Ruff + basedpyright. Also switched over to using UV. You may want to look into Astral’s TY or facebook’s rust based Pyrefly if keen to alpha / beta test.

I found getting VSCode properly set up and figuring out what extensions were needed a real pain in the ass and have never found something as good as Pycharm’s Git integration.

yehosef
So I understand - you're canceling the subscription because they advertised a product they sell?

Pycharm is the best.

blibble
I was also willing to pay to support a company that produced software I liked, worked well, and treated me as a valued customer

so when it advertised AI to me I immediately cancelled my very expensive corporate all products ultimate subscription

just using community for now

derefnull
Wing IDE is performant and I enjoy using it.

I have licenses for both Wing and PyCharm

grep_it
I still use pycharm, but these days I satisfy my debugging with pudb (https://pypi.org/project/pudb/) which has been amazing and a good middle ground for the integrated debugger feel.
zerr
PyScripter. It's a native Windows executable, should be significantly slicker and faster compared to Java or Electron based bloatware. It seems to be quite feature-full as well.