I did a clean install of OS X 10.10 on my home laptop a week ago. I tried to launch PyCharm 4.0.4 on it today. It im­me­di­ate­ly failed. Every time.

When I looked in the System Console, I saw:

1/25/15 7:46:00.557 PM pycharm[1160]: No matching VM found.
1/25/15 7:46:00.711 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.jetbrains.pycharm.58252[1160]) Service exited with abnormal code: 1

The JetBrains website wasn’t very helpful when I looked there. In time, I found a Stack­Over­flow answer that put me on the right track (and reminded me that I had previously solved this problem about a year ago, at work). PyCharm and some of the other JetBrains IDEs require JDK 1.6, as there are a number of problems with JDK 1.7 and 1.8. After I downloaded and installed Apple’s Java 6, PyCharm ran without further problems.

At work, we all use the PyCharm IDE for Python de­vel­op­ment, even those of us who are diehard Vim or Emacs users. It does a great job of helping you write and debug Python projects. The IdeaVim plugin does an acceptable job of emulating Vim key­bind­ings.