How to get PyCharm to check PEP8 code style?

For me I found that the best way for me was to include pep8 checking as an external script, something along the lines of this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121206054036/http://blog.saturnlaboratories.co.za/archive/2012/09/10/running-pylint-pycharm

The advantage of doing this is that the errors appear as sort of a todo list the bottom of the frame. This way I don't have to look around the code for errors.

OP asks for a way to highlight PEP8 errors on PyCharm, but there's another way (much clearer in my opinion) to see the violations (extracted from PyCharm's docs). Open Code | Inspect Code and friends:

Inspection Tool Window

View | Tool Windows | Inspection:

• You can access the tool window this way only when it is already opened through Code | Inspect Code.
• After you deactivate the tool window manually by clicking the Close button, the tool window is again available only through Code | Inspect Code. The Inspection tool window displays inspection results on separate tabs

Just tested it on a PyCharm Community Edition and it worked like a charm (no pun intended).

Which version of Python are you using? If it is Python 3 (maybe specifically Windows 64 bit), there are a couple of bugs logged against that on JetBrains' site:

http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-8923

http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-8077

Mine wasn't showing up due to the color scheme. By default it's marked as "weak warning", so you might have to edit the appearance to make it visible. Editor > Colors & Fonts > General > Errors and Warnings.