PyCharm Community Edition is a free Python and Django IDE for Linux, Windows, and Mac, which you can use in order to develop Python code within a very feature rich interactive development environment. It has a lot of advanced features like quick exploration of classes and attributes, renaming which you can use to easily rename pieces of code that you’re working on, auto-completion which auto-completes the code that’s being typed, advanced step-by-step debugging mode, and more.
Interface of PyCharm is very intuitive and feature rich, with a lot of different menus. Majority of them cannot be seen on the image down below because they are activated only when you either click the correct keyboard combination or when you start typing in the code editing area and you happen to typing a trigger, like for example the auto-completion trigger so that a code suggestion box is displayed.
During the installation of this free Django IDE, you’re also gonna have to have a Python interpreter installed on your system. This can be easily done by downloading the Python setup for your system from the Python website, if you’re running Windows. Other supported Operating systems come with Python by default.
Key Features of PyCharm Community Edition are:
- Exploring: allows you to easily explore the project code.
- Renaming: has an advanced find and replace tool for renaming code.
- Auto-complete: comes with a an auto-complete tool that you can use.
- Debugging: comes with a step-by-step debugger that you can use.
- Code inspector: has a built-in tool that inspects code for improvements.
- Django optimized: optimized for Django interactive development.
- Cross platform: works with Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.
Similar software: Devpad, Code Optimizer, Kind Editor.
Next to the free edition, there’s also a paid version of this free Python interactive development environment where you get a lot of additional features. One of the features that you get would be support for other web development languages like Javascript and HTML/CSS.
How to create code and program with PyCharm: free Python and Django IDE
Make sure that you install both PyCharm and the Python interpreter from the Python website. Once you have both of these installed, you can start working on projects.
So like we mentioned, the interface at first isn’t all that feature rich, but once that you open up the help files and read through the keyboard shortcuts, you’ll be able to activate the file browser, activate code viewers, and more.
We can’t go over all the features of this free Python and Django IDE, but you can see on the image above that when you type in code that auto-complete is there to help the programmer save time. A very large database of suggestions is available, and you can expand it with your own entries.
Conclusion
PyCharm Community Edition is a great way how you can improve your Python and Django coding. It’s a very feature rich interactive development environment, where you can find a lot of interesting ways how to improve Python development, even in the free version of it. Give this free IDE a try and let us know how it goes in the comments section down below.
