Visual Python Debuggers and IDEs—Which One Should You Use?

Key Takeaways

hey guys this seems like a really good time today to answer some Python questions so I got this question about visual debuggers for Python from Charlie see here I just want to read out the question so the question is hi Dan is there a debugger in Python in the Python world that is anything like the debugger in the Visual Basic IDE it seems so simple incrementing through lines of code and examining variable values and so on yes there is so there's a couple of tools that are available that you can use to to achieve that to get visual debugging with Python I'm gonna leave out some of the command line oriented or text mode oriented tools here personally I really enjoy working with PDB and PDB plus plus and I'm also a tool called PU DB those all run in the terminal and it sounds like you're more looking for something that is actually a full-blown GUI application for debugging your Python programs if you can go with the text mode stuff yeah then absolutely read up on p DB p DB + + + p UD b alright so in terms of visual debuggers that operate like the the one in the VBA IDE I would point you towards a couple of IDs and actually there's a really good list here on the Python wiki and this list is just super solid so I'm gonna link that in the description and you can you can check that out my personal preference when it comes to visual debuggers in python would be to use the pycharm ide it's a great product they have a really really solid high performance editor I remember at PyCon Munich like two years ago there was an in-depth sort of talk on how they how they actually managed to speed up the debugger and they're doing some really really interesting things to give you a good experience so this is you know well-maintained really solid and if you're looking for a proper like full-blown IDE I will probably go with pycharm I think it's a really solid product there the bugger is great like that's one of the the main selling points at least in my opinion so the other thing so PyCharm is a paid product the other thing that you could use if you're more a few more on the the entry level and in terms of your Python skills you might want to check out a tool called Thawne II which is a I guess a wordplay on on Python II or something like that and it's it is it is sort of a better version of the idle the idle environment that is just you know your your text mode interpreter for Python and this this thing is is more like an in-between between you know an editor and an IDE but more from a learning perspective and it has a pretty great debugger that again is very much focused on the learning aspect of this and I did a video where I showed off funny in the past so I'm also going to link that for on this video so you can find it probably check it out you know I would just check it out it's a free free product open-source tool and you might have a really good experience with that now there are a couple more IDs that also have built-in visual debuggers there's the pydev plugin i believe that's a plugin for the Eclipse platform I haven't used it in recent years to be honest seems like a pretty good product back in the past I at some point just abandon it and went with pycharm and now I'm actually using sublime text and I'm using you know text mode debuggers for off my all of my debugging needs but you know if you want to if you want a visual debugger at this point is probably pretty mature choice told to at least try out PI diff and and see how you like it there's also the wing IDE and the Komodo IDE and I would probably also just try them out see how much you like them if you want just one product where where I could just support that choice you know make a recommendation I would probably just check out pycharm and see if that does everything to want pretty sure it will so that would be my recommendation alright if you enjoyed this video then hit the like and subscribe buttons and if you want your own Python question answered then just leave a comment below and I'll try and do a future video on that I'm a little bit backed up with questions but just leave a comment I see them all in my YouTube when I log into YouTube and I'll try and tackle there single one of those with videos in the future right take care and happy Python II