What is an Interactive Development Environment (IDE)?

An IDE can make your development process more effective by:

• applying syntax highlighting to show your code structure
• auto-formatting your code to improve readability
• help you to search your files efficiently

IDEs can also go beyond this core functionality by:

• integrating with git to do version control on your files
• run your unit test suite
• integrating with virtual environments or Docker to run your code inside the IDE
• allow you to edit code on clusters via SSH
• and so on

What are the choices for a python IDE?

There are numerous options for an IDE in python. The two most popular are probably VS Code and PyCharm.

I work with VS Code, but it’s a matter of personal preference. I recommend installing one of these in advance of the workshop using the links above. If you use VS Code you should also install the python extension.

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