Why not just run PyCharm on your local box and tunnel-via-SSH-and-pydevd to remote-debug your programs on the target system? You get (a) a full IDE running on your local system (no need to install anything on target system); (b) full debugging and breakpoints; (c) your choice of any "real" or "virtualenv" Python deployment on the target machine. Downsides are that your own source code on the local and remote systems need to match (for your step-through-code to make sense), and you need to set up mappings between directories with source code on the local and remote systems -- but that's a low cost for full visibility into how your program runs on the target system.