Choosing a Python IDE for ArcGIS in 2018

[MattWilkie3]

This blog post on Choosing the right Python Integrated Development Environment from 2013 is aged and needs a reboot.  What says the community now on the preferred IDEs for writing scripts with arcpy?

[JoeBorgione]

If you can get it loaded into ArcGIS Pro, Spyder is pretty nice...

[MattWilkie3]

One experience to contribute: As concluded in the blog post, for quite awhile PyScripter was also my best tool --lightweight, feature rich, performant, free and open source. However it stagnated with only one release between 2012 and 2017 and I started experiencing more and more problems with it. After trying and discarding many the IDE's including the awesome PyCharm (excellent tool, just too heavyweight for me) I finally settled on the almost unknown Pyzo which allowed me to switch between python 2.7 and 3.x seamlessly in the same session and was conda aware.

Today I'm happy to see PyScripter is back under active development and advertises switching environments also without exiting. I haven't tried it again at this point though as I'm still happy with Pyzo.

[DanPatterson_Retired · Accepted solution]

I have used all the Py**** ide 's

/blogs/dan_patterson/2018/01/28/spyder 

check out the screen grabs... a visual guide

A truly project base program and those IPython %magic thingys are pretty handy.

Lots more on my blog Matt. 

I have Spyder, Jupyter console, Jupyter notebook and even... pythonwin (for those nostalgia moments).

Spyder for main work and as the IDE for ArcGIS Pro editing, Jupyter console for quick one-liners and snippet testing... Jupyter notebook because uhhhh … oh yes, the ArcGIS module

[MattWilkie3]

Jupyter speaks arcpy? Cool. I didn't know that, Jupyter is one of those things on the perennial "I must learn about that!" inbox that somehow never gets any love

[DanPatterson_Retired]

check my blogs... Matt. I think I have covered everything there and if there isn't something that you want to see, let me know

[HafezAhmad]

there is a wide range of options. it depends on your workflows and purposes.

if your work based on the web, then the appropriate code editor would be pycharm pro or vs code.

if your work on data science, then spyder would be the best option. now spyder integrates kite machine learning process which is very useful in the case of autocompletes and documentation. additionally, vs code and spyder are free and pycharm pro is a commercial code editor.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

I know... I have many blogs on spyder, cloning, and numpy, scipy related issues.

As for Spyder... 2018 was so two-years-ago

/blogs/dan_patterson/2019/12/12/spyder-4-the-python-ide-for-science 

[FredKellner2]

I have always liked Spyder but had a hard time implementing when I had ArcGIS Installed. Checkout this SE GIS post and use a Anaconda installation of Spyder.  Thankfully now I have an Anaconda environment which also contains access to Arcpy.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

check my blogs as well Fred... skip the clones, conda the original 2.2 and things are fine... as long as you are administrator there is no need to clone to install other packages