Launch Pycharm from command line (terminal)

Question

I want to try out PyCharm for sage mathematics development. Normally I run eclipse to do sage development, but now I want to try it with PyCharm.

To launch eclipse with sage environment variables, in command line I normally do the following:

sage -sh
cd /path/to/eclipse
./eclipse

The first line loads the sage environment variables, the remainder launches eclipse. How can I do the same thing for pyCharm? (note I am using a Mac and Ubuntu for sage development; the commands above are agnostic to both OSes)

1. Link 1 is close to the solution I am looking for, however I cannot find a pyCharm.sh anywhere.
2. Link 2: Jetbrains does not give clear instructions either.

Answer 1

Inside the IDE, you can click in:

Tools/Create Command-line Launcher...

Answer 2

You can launch Pycharm from Mac terminal using the open command. Just type open /path/to/App

Applications$ ls -lrt PyCharm\ CE.app/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x@ 71 amit  admin  2414 Sep 24 11:08 lib
drwxr-xr-x@  4 amit  admin   136 Sep 24 11:08 help
drwxr-xr-x@ 12 amit  admin   408 Sep 24 11:08 plugins
drwxr-xr-x@ 29 amit  admin   986 Sep 24 11:08 license
drwxr-xr-x@  4 amit  admin   136 Sep 24 11:08 skeletons
-rw-r--r--@  1 amit  admin    10 Sep 24 11:08 build.txt
drwxr-xr-x@  6 amit  admin   204 Sep 24 11:12 Contents
drwxr-xr-x@ 14 amit  admin   476 Sep 24 11:12 bin
drwxr-xr-x@ 31 amit  admin  1054 Sep 25 21:43 helpers
/Applications$
/Applications$ open PyCharm\ CE.app/

Answer 3

You're right that the JetBrains help page isn't very clear. On OS X, you'll want to use the launcher at:

/Applications/PyCharm.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm

Or, for community edition:

/Applications/PyCharm\ CE.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm

Unfortunately, adding a symlink to this binary wouldn't work for me (the launcher would crash). Setting an alias worked, though. Add this in your .bash_profile (or whatever shell you use):

alias pycharm="/Applications/PyCharm CE.app/Contents/MacOS/pycharm"

Then, you can run commands with simply pycharm.

With this you can do things like open a project:

pycharm ~/repos/my-project

Or open a specific line of a file in a project:

pycharm ~/repos/my-project --line 42 ~/repos/my-project/script.py

Or view the diff of two files (they don't need to be part of a project):

pycharm ~/some_file.txt ~/Downloads/some_other_file.txt

Note that I needed to pass absolute paths to those files or PyCharm couldn't find them..

Answer 4

After installing on kubuntu, I found that my pycharm script in ~/bin/pycharm was just a desktop entry:

[Desktop Entry]                                                                                                                                                                                                 
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=PyCharm Community Edition
Icon=/snap/pycharm-community/79/bin/pycharm.png
Exec=env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/pycharm-community_pycharm-community.desktop /snap/bin/pycharm-community %f
Comment=Python IDE for Professional Developers
Categories=Development;IDE;
Terminal=false
StartupWMClass=jetbrains-pycharm-ce

Obviously, I could not use this to open anything from the command line:

$ pycharm setup.py
/home/eldond/bin/pycharm_old: line 1: [Desktop: command not found
/home/eldond/bin/pycharm_old: line 4: Community: command not found

But there's a hint in the desktop entry file. Looking in /snap/pycharm-community/, I found /snap/pycharm-community/current/bin/pycharm.sh. I removed ~/bin/pycharm (actually renamed it to have a backup) and then did

ln -s /snap/pycharm-community/current/bin/pycharm.sh pycharm

where again, I found the start of the path by inspecting the desktop entry script I had to start with.

Now I can open files with pycharm from the command line. I don't know what I messed up during install this time; the last two times I've done fresh installs, it's had no trouble.

Answer 5

Use Tools -> Create Command-line Launcher which will install a python script where you can just launch the current working folder using charm .

Very important!

Anytime you upgrade your pyCharm you have to re-create that command line tool since its just a python script that points to a pyCharm configuration which might be outdated and will cause it to fail when you attempt to run charm .

Answer 6

Navigate to the directory on the terminal cd [your directory]

Navigate to the directory on the terminal

use charm . to open the project in PyCharm

Simplest and quickest way to open a project in PyCharm