Appendix C — Choosing an Editor
The original Snake Charming workshop used PyCharm Community Edition inside a prepared Ubuntu virtual machine. That worked well for a classroom in 2019 because everyone started from the same environment.
Today, JetBrains ships PyCharm as a unified product. The old Community Edition features are now part of PyCharm’s free core features, and Pro features sit behind a subscription after the trial period. So if you see older course notes mention “PyCharm Community Edition”, read that as the free core PyCharm experience unless the note is clearly historical.
My old example project was called bernauer, so if you see that name in screenshots or snippets, mentally replace it with the name of whatever excellent little project you’re building.
This edition is intentionally less prescriptive. You can use any editor that lets you:
- create and edit
.pyfiles; - run Python code;
- select the Python interpreter or virtual environment for the project;
- open notebooks if you want to work through the
.ipynbchapters interactively.
PyCharm, VS Code, JupyterLab, and terminal-first editors are all reasonable choices. Pick the tool that lets you stay focused on learning Python rather than wrestling with preferences. If you accidentally choose the “wrong” editor, it’s no big deal; you can still write the same Python later.
If your code behaves differently in the editor and terminal, check sys.executable in both places. Most environment mysteries start there, wearing a very boring hat.
Checkpoint
Open this repository in your editor and confirm that it can run a Python file using the virtual environment you created in the previous chapter.
Extension Activity
Create a scratch Python file that prints sys.executable, run it from your editor, and compare the result with the terminal. If they differ, update the editor interpreter setting and run the check again.