What is the best environment to use?

[ComputerAstronaut]

What's the best environment to use for Python? I'm using the default IDLE and I'm not a huge fan, I'm seeing alot of different ones that look way better. Any help is appreciated.

[jefsummers]

This is one of those religious questions where you will get lots of answers, everyone will have a different opinion.

And, of course, it depends on what you are wanting to do.

For general purpose programming, I like using Anaconda for the environment and either Spyder or VSCode for the IDE. And, for data science either Jupyter Lab or Google's colab.

IDLE is a good desktop calculator and good for scratch code, but would not try to develop anything serious with that. And, I'm sure there will be those who disagree.

[ComputerAstronaut]

How does an IDE work within an environment?

[ndc85430]

What do you mean by "environment"? Your question is quite vague. Do you know what an IDE is?

[ComputerAstronaut]

Oh I'm being redundant. Idle is the IDE right? I just see other people use and IDE that runs the module at the bottom of the screen so you dont have to keep opening and running the module to test the code in a new window. also they're using something called Kite.