I along with my colleagues Prof.Veena A., and Prof.Asha Rani K. P., were discussing which IDE (Integrated Development Environment) has to be recommended for students to code their Python projects.

After lots of deliberations, we had two options in front of us.

First is the PyCharm Professional edition which is available for free to the students if they can provide their institutional email address.

Second is the VS Code which is open source and available for everyone.

After lots of brainstorming, we recommended VS Code to students.

The advantages that tilted towards favoring VS Code are below:

1. VS Code is used by a huge pool of developers.

2. One IDE for all development environments, including Python Programming, Web Programming, and others.

3. Availability of several extensions that can extend the functionality of VS Code. Popular extensions are available for customizing the VS Code, remote development, linting, and debugging.

4. VS Code is lightweight and open source.

5. VS Code is industry standard. The knowledge of using VS Code can be carried from academia to the industry by the students.

We have listed the extensions which we highly recommend for the students to install in order to setup a Python Development Environment.

1. Pylance
2. Python extension for Visual Studio Code
3. Python Indent
4. Remote-SSH
5. Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH: Editing Configuration Files
6. Spell Right
7. Visual Studio IntelliCode
8. Visual Studio Keymap for Visual Studio Code
9. vscode-icons
10. vscode-pdf
11. emojisense
12. CodeSnap
13. GitHub Copilot
14. GitHub Pull Requests and Issues
15. GitLens
16. indent-rainbow
17. Jupyter
18. Jupyter Keymap
19. Jupyter Notebook Renderer
20. Live Share
21. Live Share Audio
22. Live Share Extension Pack
23. Markdown All in One
24. Markdown PDF
25. markdownlint
26. Night Owl
27. open in browser
28. Paste Image
29. Project Manager

Happy Coding!!