My husband, who mostly codes in assembly these days (he’s mostly retired so his hobby is old atari, amstrad, and spectrum computers), went from VSCode, to Sublime, to now Kate. He prefers to use 100% open source apps, without strings attached. VSCode is nice, but it has lots of weird stuff in it that aren’t necessarily up to the spirit of open source. So Kate works perfectly for him, although VSCodium would do well as well (it’s just that Kate has better syntax highlighters for his weird assembly). Also VSCode/ium is using about 250 MB of RAM, while Kate about 45 (and Sublime only about 32).

vim/nvim is really great

Neovim! Here is a good video to get started TJ DeVries. If you just want to give it a shot there are a lot of preconfigured options like lunar vim or NVchad.

I’m slowly learning Emacs, I’d say I like it but it’s a lot of config work and I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who hasn’t programmed before.

Codium. It’s VSCode without the proprietary stuff

Because people ask for an IDE, rather than an editor, I will say :

Vim + terminal(s) + containerization (e.g. Docker CLI, Python venv) + live reloading (e.g. nodemon or inotify or in the browser using e.g. server side events) + repository management (e.g. git in CLI to juggle between branches, push/pull local/remotely)

IMHO this is very VERY light (0 wait even on a RPi Zero) and yet very flexible.

Also most of that can be “saved” via e.g screen the CLI tool, allowing to have named windows in a terminal and a lot more than to e.g. screen -raAD, locally or remotely.

It pains me to admit this but VSCodium has become my de facto standard

https://vscodium.com/

I’m a big fan of vim/neovim with nerdtree and airline added in.

I’ve also been tryingourt Zed recently, it natively supports vim keybindings, so my workflow hasn’t changed, but its lightning fast (programmed in rust) compared to vs-codium (an electron app)

I use Vim ;)

Python itself provides IDLE, which is good enough for beginners. https://thonny.org/ is another good one for beginners.

As mentioned by others, Jetbrains is good for many languages. https://www.kdevelop.org/ is another option.

Emacs and geany

Zed

Honestly, just try a few of the big ones and see what you like, I feel like with IDEs it’s all about personal preferences and rarely about actual amount of features.

Good ones to start with can be PyCharm and vscodium, but try a few, that’s the best option.

Netbeans for java was good to me as a student.

For python PyCharm is unbeatable.

Eclipse Theia if you already know VSCode.

It copied the interface and functionality and is compatible with most VSCode extensions. Available as an AppImage on Linux.