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What is the best IDE for developing in Julia?

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash; Julia logo By The Julia Project — https://julialang.org, Public Domain, Link According to the Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey, the top loved languages of the year were Rust, TypeScript, Python, Kotlin, Go, and…Julia?

That’s right — Julia is an up-and-coming language that first came onto the scene in 2012, so it may be worth it to get familiar with it. To get started, you’re going to need an IDE, and this article has got you covered with a summary of the IDEs available as well as the general internet zeitgeist around them.

Just want the answer? Overall, my findings indicate that Julia is pretty welcoming to a variety of IDEs and doesn’t necessarily lead you one way or another. It comes down to user preference, and that includes factors like what you find to be efficient on your computer, what products you’re used to working with before, and so on.

You could follow this general thought flow chart, then:

Do you like VSCode? Try that first.

Do you use Vim or Emacs? Try that.

Do you use Sublime? Try that.

Do you use Atom? Then use Juno, which is built on Atom.

None of the above? I’d try Juno or VSCode — they’re really similar at this point, anyways.

Juno

Public domain image by ∁ormullion on Flickr Main site Free “Canvas programming” style: “exploratory power of a notebook with the productivity of an IDE” Built on Atom so shares many properties of Atom Multiple cursors Fuzzy file finding Vim keybindings Comes pre-packaged with JuliaPro Juno is the most developed IDE for Julia. I quite like it.

— ChrisRackauckas on /r/Julia

If only Atom weren’t so sluggish and slow on older laptops. Using Juno, I miss the responsiveness and speed of Sublime Text.

— 4-Vektor on /r/Julia

I use Juno, but I’d love for an alternative to come around. Atom is a great tool so I don’t like that I have to essentially dedicate the interface to one language. Also within Juno there’s no great way to interact with or visualize tables — the inline view feels clumsy. An RStudio or Rodeo equivalent for Julia would be amazing.

— heckarstix or /r/Julia

For exploring ideas, Juno is pretty great, cos I can use the Plot pane for graphic output.

— cormullion on /r/Julia

… consider that the startup time on Juno is a bit slower than VSCode which annoyed me after a few weeks of usage and Juno kind of takes over Atom and makes it very Julia-centered, so if you are using other languages it becomes wasted space.

— bionicdna on /r/Julia

Never got Juno for Atom working myself. Very buggy. What I do at the moment is simply have a text editor in the left pane of my screen and a Julia console on the right pane of the screen. If they hadn’t gotten rid of the “whos” command I could work with only that setup.

— radionul on /r/Julia

I’m a really big fan of the atom/Juno IDE. it feels like it reproduces some of my favorite functionality in sublime text as well as the command window in Matlab.

— woobwoobwoob on /r/Julia

One important thing is that you have a pretty nice documentation and Workspace panels in Juno, where you can check everything in your “session” function, variables, modules, …

— joseRLM17 on /r/Julia

Juno for Atom is probably your best starting bet. You can try VSCode down the line to see if you prefer it but it’s definitely easier to start out using Juno.

— MrMehawk on /r/Julia

VSCode

By Microsoft — Captured from Visual Studio Code version 1.35, which itself can be downloaded from code.visualstudio.com, Public Domain, Link Here’s the thing about VSCode: the IDE extension for Julia is almost at feature parity with Juno, according to Julia Schmidt of DevClass. Microsoft recently purchased GitHub, and as a result development of the Atom project isn’t as high priority is used to be due to the natural competition it creates with VSCode.

If you’re looking to the future, getting into the VSCode ecosystem does seem to make sense.

Main site Free and open-source Extension installation instructions Syntax highlighting Snippets Latex snippets Julia specific commands Integrated Julia REPL Code completion Hover help A linter Code navigation Tasks for running tests, builds, benchmarks and build documentation An experimental debugger A plot gallery A grid viewer for tabular data Integrated support for Weave.jl I really liked VSCode when I tried it, but on my slow Mac it dawdles somewhat… :)

— cormullion on /r/Julia

I’ve read somewhere that Juno is moving to VSCode, can’t wait to see the results. I can’t use WSL with Atom and for whatever reason startup on (even simple) Julia files is often terrible.

— [deleted] on /r/Julia

That is a long term goal. Right now the Juno developers are working together with the vscode-julia extension team to bring them to feature parity.

— Namensplatzhalter on /r/Julia

In VSCode there is no Workspace panel ( i think ) and the documentation usually just appears while hovering a variable name ( this is also featured in Juno). In fact JuliaPro is based on Juno. I know it seems that Juno is plain better than VSCode from what Im writting but I just prefer VSCode because it feels faster to me and I don’t really use those features, but prefer some really fast “file handling” and terminal interaction.

— joseRLM17 on /r/Julia

I’ve just been using VS Code and it works well. IDE’s are quite large programs and I like being able to use the same IDE environment for as many languages as possible, so VS Code is a great choice. I use it for Python, Go, Bash, C, C++, and Julia. Also usually for editing structured text files, it has good YAML and JSON support, and also has plugins for ansible, ini, xml, and others. For all of those mentioned languages it has linting and symbol hints, as well as usually having things like “jump to function declaration” or “find symbol uses in project” right-click actions.

— theferrit32 on /r/Julia

I used to think Atom/Juno was the ideal Julia IDE until someone got me to try VSCode and I was blown away by how much faster it was as well as some neat features with precompilation stashing and variable/function location diving. Plus the vim keybindings in VSCode are miles ahead of what is available in Atom.

That said, I’ve tried standalone development in Vim itself but the feature set offered by something like VSCode has always pulled me back. Integrated debugging and variable exploration is quite nice, and these all require less out-of-the-box configuration on VSCode (or Juno even) meaning less work when working on industry and work computers.

— bionicdna on /r/Julia

I do think the VS Code extension is simple. All you do is install VS Code, then search inside VS Code for the Julia extension and install it from within VS Code. The extension finds your Julia installation automatically in most cases, and then it doesn’t need to install anything, i.e. it is not installing any further Julia packages or anything like that.

And VS Code itself is a pretty lean and simple code editor, that in particular has nothing to do with the full fledged Visual Studio.

— davidanthoff on JuliaLang Discourse

Jupyter

By Cameron Oelsen — https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter.github.io/blob/master/assets/main-logo.svg, BSD, Link Main site Free and open-source Installation instructions Supports live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text I … like using Jupyter … editing is easier if you have the Vim plugin (for editing inside the Code cells)., because there aren’t many editing tools otherwise.

— cormullion on /r/Julia

Jupyter Lab. This is great for quick notebook work (I’ve used it extensively for homework assignments), but I honestly wouldn’t rely on this to start as some might say. I was caught off guard by how JL’s Julia references variables and how functions and modules are handled. It’s different than pure script Julia, and almost as if it’s all locally-defined inside a function or everything is global with full access. Just keep that in mind if you decide to start with JL and wonder why you can’t use a variable in a loop without global declaration outside of a function the first time you start messing with .jl files.

— bionicdna on /r/Julia

Emacs

By Nicolas Petton — https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/images/icons, GPLv3, Link Main site Installation instructions Free and open-source All the perks of Emacs with Julia development The one, the only, emacs. julia mode, just that, it works fine for me.

…

The only issue I’ve had with Julia in emacs is that ein does not work well with Julia, so notebooks you still have to do in the browser.

— [deleted] on /r/Julia

I’m using emacs as well. I like to use the same editor for all my writing (e.g. LaTeX, programming) and there is also org-mode which can be neat.

— sebastock on /r/Julia

I use Emacs as an editor and tmux to make an IDE.

— graphitewriter on /r/Julia

I was going to refrain from suggesting emacs, but if you already know your way around it, I’d definitely recommend using emacs for julia development. The simplest setup is just using https://github.com/tpapp/julia-repl 20 but I also find that once one sets up https://github.com/dzop/emacs-jupyter 21 its also a really great way to use julia (and other jupyter compatible languages) in emacs.

— Mason on JuliaLang Discourse

Vim

By User:D0ktorz — reworked in SVG, GPL, Link Main site Installation instructions Free and open-source All the perks of Vim with Julia development For quickly editing a file after include-ing it in the REPL, Vim/MacVim (via Julia’s edit function is really quick and easy and you don’t have to leave the terminal. Using OhMyREPL makes using the REPL very pleasant.

— cormullion on /r/Julia

I’m using vim/nvim + Julia plugin + vim slime + vim pandoc. I’m not doing a ton of Julia right now but I’m liking this setup sir far.

— USMCamp0811 on /r/Julia

Honestly, I’ve tried Atom, but I keep coming back to Vim. Coupled with tmux and vim-slime and it’s really nice. Especially as I practically live in Vim already.

The only downside is that syntax highlighting in Vim isn’t as good as it could be.

— spaceLem on /r/Julia

If you are comfortable with emacs and want simplicity over bells and whistles, I think it’s hard to beat editing in emacs with julia-mode and running the Julia REPL in a standard terminal.

— GunnarFarneback on JuliaLang Discourse

Sublime Text

By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, Link Main site Installation instructions Free Custom color support Goto anything Goto definition Multiple selections Command palette Split editing I use sublime with the Julia plugin coupled with an open REPL in an xterm and run stuff from another xterm… also notebooks recently.

sublime is the new emacs ))

— starbucksresident on /r/Julia

I don’t mean to start any flame wars or fruitless discussions on the merits of various editors, but it seems to me that Julia users need to be made aware of the benefits of using Sublime Text 3 for programming in Julia.

Just a few notes:

The Julia language-syntax mode works flawlessly.

The ability to evaluate selections, lines of code, and files is smooth and matches or exceeds experience I’ve had in other editors.

The terminals in the editor can be made fully functional on Windows, as it is trivial to start cmd, Powershell, git bash, or Linux shell (WSL) within the editor. (I was never able to make this work properly with Atom or with Emacs.)

The power of snippets cannot be exaggerated.

The editor is seriously FAST. (I have had some really bad experiences recently with VS Code which slowed down to a lag of several seconds per action. Atom has always been slowish.)

The ability to program the editor in Python means that integration of the editor with your own Julia code using pycall can go far.

The integration of the editor with Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition means that the power of either can be significantly boosted by synergy with the other. (Pop me a line if you want to find out more.)

…

Sublime Text 3 readily supports multiple terminals running Julia at different versions (0.7, 1.2, 1.4 dev, …). The instructions 28 have been updated with the description of the “trivial” change to accommodate multiple Julia versions.

— PetrKryslUCSD on JuliaLang Discourse

I used Sublime previously, and it’s really good, but started falling behind the rapid development of Atom and VS Code. They seem to have picked up the speed, though.

— DNF on JuliaLang Discourse

https://blog.devgenius.io/what-is-the-best-ide-for-developing-in-the-programming-language-julia-484c913f07bc