I have had a similar path, except for VS. I have been happy (and still am) with Emacs for a very long time (in particular, I really like how easy it is to have some code in the left window, which I can easily send to an IPython REPL in the right window), but recently, for a new job, I picked up PyCharm Pro, and I must say that it's been pretty transformative. Three aspects stand out IMO:
- It's a fantastic tool to explore and understand big, industrial codebases
- The testing and debugging support is stellar
- The Emacs binding emulation is great (so it's easy to feel relatively at "home")
It's actually quite easy, as it comes pretty much out of the box with recent versions of Emacs (24+) and python.el (not to be confused with the older python-mode.el). I could not find a nice web source for python.el's documentation, but it turns out that directly reading its code is not so bad in this case:
In particular, you need to set the `python-shell-interpreter` variable to "ipython" (which must be in your path preferably). You can then invoke `run-python` to start a REPL, and C-c C-c to send a buffer to it.
There are a couple more interesting commands with this mode, see:
- It's a fantastic tool to explore and understand big, industrial codebases
- The testing and debugging support is stellar
- The Emacs binding emulation is great (so it's easy to feel relatively at "home")