rshell VS Pico-Go

If you don't want a GUI, you can use rshell which was written for the original Pyboard and the very first MicroPython implemention. It is a simple tool that can copy files in/out of the pico filesystem, and gives you the REPL prompt too.

inside pythonsdk, it recommends using either Thonny or rshell. Since I was pretty sure Thonny was gonna take a lot of work, I tried rshell; however it seemed rshell was gonna to work rshell issue. I was looking around for alternatives and landed on ampy.

CircuitPython is a fork of MicroPython, and they periodically bring in commits from MicroPython to stay up to date.

One advantage of CircuitPython is that your board gets mounted as a volume like a USB drive, and you can just copy code.py onto it to install your program; it's just a more user-friendly experience. For comparison MicroPython only exposes a file system through a tool called rshell[1], that you need to use to copy code over. CircuitPython also seems to have a lot more libraries due to Adafruit's investment in this ecosystem, although I suspect that most of them could easily be adapted to work with both.

[1] https://github.com/dhylands/rshell

I already tried pico-go which worked fine, but I found out that I cannot import my own libraries (i get an error that the library doesn't exist) even though the documentation here in section Pylance shows that it indeed should work. I wanted to report the issue, but on the github, a post from the author says that support for pico-go is basically halted, although the author is searching for someone to either take over the project or at least maintain it.