The native features in MATLAB are often very good most of the time, as I’ve yet to hear anybody spending time to shop for a IDE outside the official one.

Atom has the feel of Maple/MathCAD, and Jupyter Notebook has the feel of Mathematica. Spyder feels like MATLAB the most, but it’s hugely primitive.

IDLE is more miserable than a command prompt. It doesn’t even have the decency to recall command history with up arrow. It’s like freaking DOS before loading doskey.com. Not to mention that single clicking on the window won’t set the cursor to the active command line, which you have to scroll all the way down to click on the bottom line. WTF! I’d rather use the command prompt and give up meaningless syntax coloring.

IPython (in Spyder) is unbearably slow (compare to MATLAB’s editor which I consider slow to the extent that it’s marginally bearable for the interactive features it offers), but at least usable unlike IDLE, and most importantly the output display is pprint (pretty printer) formatted so it’s legible. Just type locals() and see what kind of sh*t Python spits out in IDLE/cmd.exe and you’ll see what I meant.

I simply cannot live without who/whos provided in IPython, but I still don’t like it showing the accessible functions/modules along with the variables (I know, Python doesn’t tell them apart). Nonetheless it’s still weak because these are automagics that doesn’t return the results as Python data (just print). Spyder’s ‘variable explorer’ is the only place I can find that doesn’t include loaded functions/modules. Python should have provided facilities to get the user-introduced variables exclusively and leave the modules to a different function like MATLAB’s import command that shows imported packages/classes.

However, pretty printer doesn’t even come close to MATLAB in terms of the amount of dirty work disp() did to format the text to make it easy to read. Keys in the dictionary shown in pretty printer in Python are not right-aligned like MATLAB struct so we can easily tell keys and values apart. For example:

MATLAB struct shows:
          name: 'S'
          size: [9 1]
         bytes: 7765
         class: 'struct'
        global: 0
        sparse: 0
       complex: 0
       nesting: [1×1 struct]
    persistent: 0

Python with Pretty Printer shows:
{'__name__': '__main__',
 '__doc__': 'Automatically created module for IPython interactive environment',
 '__package__': None,
 '__loader__': None,
 '__spec__': None,
 '__builtin__': <module 'builtins' (built-in)>,
 '__builtins__': <module 'builtins' (built-in)>,
 '_ih': ['', 'locals()'],
 '_oh': {},
 '_dh': ['C:\\Users\\Administrator'],
 'In': ['', 'locals()'],
 'Out': {},
 'get_ipython': <bound method InteractiveShell.get_ipython of <ipykernel.zmqshell.ZMQInteractiveShell object at 0x00000000059B7828>>,
 'exit': <IPython.core.autocall.ZMQExitAutocall at 0x5a3b198>,
 'quit': <IPython.core.autocall.ZMQExitAutocall at 0x5a3b198>,
 '_': '',
 '__': '',
 '___': '',
 '_i': '',
 '_ii': '',
 '_iii': '',
 '_i1': 'locals()'}

I often convert things to MATLAB dataset() because the disp() method is excellent, such as struct2dataset(ver()). table/disp() is nice, but I think they overdid it by defaulting to fancy rich-text that bold the header, which makes it a magnitude of orders slower, and it’s not using the limited visual space effectively to show more data. Python still has a lot more to do in the user-friendly department.