Pick the correct edition for your needs
In this course, we are going to use the Community Edition of PyCharm. This is a fully-fledged IDE for Python Development. What’s even better is that it's free! There is an alternative version of PyCharm available (Professional Edition), which also supports Scientific and Web development, but it is a paid-for product so we are not going to use it during this course.
To download the PyCharm Community Edition, visit JetBrains. On this page there will be options for installing the Community Edition of PyCharm on either Windows, Mac, or Linux. You should download the correct version depending on which operating system you are using.
Install PyCharm
The way you install PyCharm varies across different operating systems (Windows, MacOS, or Linux), but shouldn’t be too complicated! Because I’m using a Mac, the following installation instructions are Mac specific.
Once you have downloaded a PyCharm .dmg file, opening the file should prompt you to move PyCharm Community Edition into your Applications folder as follows:
Once you have done this you are basically all set!
Run PyCharm
Similar to installing PyCharm Community Edition, running the program is slightly different depending on which operating system you are using. Again, because I’m using a Mac, my instructions are Mac-specific. However, running PyCharm Community Edition on another operating system should be analogous to running any other program on your operating system. On Windows, for example, it should be available to you via the Start menu, or you could create a shortcut to PyCharm on your desktop.
On a Mac, you can open PyCharm Community Edition via your Applications folder. Click on ‘Finder’ then ‘Applications’ and you should see PyCharm CE installed:
Note that I have both PyCharm Professional and PyCharm CE (Community Edition) installed. This is why I have two listings for PyCharm in my applications folder: ‘PyCharm’ and ‘PyCharm CE’. After you have installed PyCharm CE you should only have this application installed!
Let’s Recap!
PyCharm Community Edition is a free version of the PyCharm IDE, which comes highly recommended!
PyCharm is a JetBrains product, so you can download it from their website.
You can run PyCharm from the command line or via a more traditional way of starting a program.
Now that you have successfully downloaded, installed and run PyCharm, let’s get started with learning how to use it!
