I was a Vim user for 5 years, then an Emacs user for about 3, and then I purchased PyCharm two weeks ago.
I don't regret buying it, but after some time I realised that it's impossible to replace Emacs completely with PyCharm.
PyCharm's support for refactoring and code transformations is very good. It's fast and easy and it makes some kinds of source code edits much more efficient than what you can do even in Vim and Emacs. Its debugger, including remote debugger is very good, too. Visualising project and file structure in a sidebar is much, much better than what Speedbar and ECB (at least for Python - I heard they work very well for other languages) can do. Codebase navigation is nice (go to symbol, etc.), although Emacs with all its tools like jedi, ag, e/ctags, occur, imenu and so on is not that much worse here.
PyCharm is very good for working with code. However, it lacks so many text editing features, that it's just too painful for me to use it exclusively. Even with many plugins installed and multiple cursors feature provided (recently - how could it take them so long to implement it?) text editing experience in PyCharm is much worse than it is in Emacs (or Vim, for that matter). And, unfortunately, working with source code is in large part the same as working with plain text.
An then there's a problem with extending PyCharm. The need to write Java code to extend an editor seems like a really bad joke. There are plugins, which let you script PyCharm with Groovy or Clojure, which I installed, only to discover that the Clojure syntax highlighting plugin for PyCharm doesn't work right now. Discovering the relevant APIs to call from a script was a major pain, too, compared to Emacs built-in combo of info manuals and help system with apropos and many reflective commands like describe-*. This is a problem, because using Emacs made my tolerance for putting up with broken/inconvenient behaviours disappear - many things I know I should be able to achieve in two keypresses in PyCharm take 3 or 4. That's not a big difference and I realize it! Yet after working with Emacs and writing ~5k loc of Elisp to scratch almost all my daily itches I just can't force myself to just ignore it and get used to this itching again, even if it's minor.
My solution was to create a quick keyboard shortcut in PyCharm which calls emacsclient with current file, placing the cursor in a current line. Surprisingly, it works very well. Launching a new Emacs frame takes almost no time at all, and when I close the frame after editing, PyCharm immediately displays updated content.
I don't regret buying it, but after some time I realised that it's impossible to replace Emacs completely with PyCharm.
PyCharm's support for refactoring and code transformations is very good. It's fast and easy and it makes some kinds of source code edits much more efficient than what you can do even in Vim and Emacs. Its debugger, including remote debugger is very good, too. Visualising project and file structure in a sidebar is much, much better than what Speedbar and ECB (at least for Python - I heard they work very well for other languages) can do. Codebase navigation is nice (go to symbol, etc.), although Emacs with all its tools like jedi, ag, e/ctags, occur, imenu and so on is not that much worse here.
PyCharm is very good for working with code. However, it lacks so many text editing features, that it's just too painful for me to use it exclusively. Even with many plugins installed and multiple cursors feature provided (recently - how could it take them so long to implement it?) text editing experience in PyCharm is much worse than it is in Emacs (or Vim, for that matter). And, unfortunately, working with source code is in large part the same as working with plain text.
An then there's a problem with extending PyCharm. The need to write Java code to extend an editor seems like a really bad joke. There are plugins, which let you script PyCharm with Groovy or Clojure, which I installed, only to discover that the Clojure syntax highlighting plugin for PyCharm doesn't work right now. Discovering the relevant APIs to call from a script was a major pain, too, compared to Emacs built-in combo of info manuals and help system with apropos and many reflective commands like describe-*. This is a problem, because using Emacs made my tolerance for putting up with broken/inconvenient behaviours disappear - many things I know I should be able to achieve in two keypresses in PyCharm take 3 or 4. That's not a big difference and I realize it! Yet after working with Emacs and writing ~5k loc of Elisp to scratch almost all my daily itches I just can't force myself to just ignore it and get used to this itching again, even if it's minor.
My solution was to create a quick keyboard shortcut in PyCharm which calls emacsclient with current file, placing the cursor in a current line. Surprisingly, it works very well. Launching a new Emacs frame takes almost no time at all, and when I close the frame after editing, PyCharm immediately displays updated content.