MARCO MAFFEZZOLI

Please find below a list of free code editors and Integrated Development Environments that turn out to be particularly useful for scientific applications:

- Spyder: "a powerful scientific environment written in Python, for Python, and designed by and for scientists, engineers and data analysts. It offers a unique combination of the advanced editing, analysis, debugging, and profiling functionality of a comprehensive development tool with the data exploration, interactive execution, deep inspection, and beautiful visualization capabilities of a scientific package." Great for interactive work! Please note that Spyder is installed by default in Anaconda.

- PyCharm: a full-blown professional Python IDE. "PyCharm integrates with IPython Notebook, has an interactive Python console, and supports Anaconda as well as multiple scientific packages including matplotlib and NumPy." The Community Edition is free for all, while the Professional Edition, which is much better tailored for scientific applications, is free for academic use only.

- Visual Studio Code: a free and open source code editor developed by Microsoft; it includes support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring. Support for Python is provided via an extension. Other useful extensions are Code Runner and Jupyter.

- Atom: a free and open-source text and source code editor with support for plug-ins developed by GitHub. This blog post describes how to set up a Python development environment in Atom.