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Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

spyder-ide.org

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Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our current approach to is very similar to the native Jupyter experience where notebook contains multiple separate cells. You can manipulate these cells with shortcuts or mouse. It looks very similar to Jupyter or JupyterLab. At the same time, if you open a Python script, you'll be able to use cell delimiters (aka `#%%`).

Would you happen to know if Spyder renders interactive Plotly plots in console or inline? I know that I can open plots in a browser window, but it is not as convenient.

The top right pane has Variable Explorer,Help, and Plots tabs. Plotly plots using the png or svg renderers will be displayed there. Not interactive though. VS Code on the other hand can do what you're looking for if you specify the "plotly_mimetype" renderer for your plots.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#152

I like spyder a lot for the variable explorer, which makes it feel more like Matlab. However the constant bothering about installing Kite got annoying. Unfortunately there isn't a way to use Kite and have it not constantly annoy you about upgrading to the enterprise edition. If Kite had a no ads plan for like ~ $10 a year it would make a lot more sense to integrate it in spyder.

Not to be trite, but there is a github repo and the license is MIT. I'd guess it's possible to find the relevant nag code (possibly in its own github commit), strip it out, and recompile. Edit. maybe this is what you're talking about? https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/commit/6b602af50f632cf6...

I would say the average person using spyder would have no idea how to do this. They program as if they are in R and not Python, so it’s short procedures in certain packages.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#153
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this is the thing: code completion in Python is not a a simple task and we've struggled for years to improve it. Now we support the Language Server Protocol (designed by Microsoft for VSCode), but still things are not great, i.e. there are many things that can't be completed by Jedi, specially for scientific libraries. So, thanks to Kite's software, we implemented a client for it and now lightly promote it to o…

Like a fellow poster said, that's easily manipulated, especially if the marketing of a VC-funded startup jumps on the train. My concern with this would be that you've arguably turned a nice free (as in freedom!), open-source-tool into a vehicle to push more or less proprietary and user-tracking code onto naive, unknowing users (though I guess that is not too uncommon in the anaconda-ecosystem you target - spack user…

> My concern with this would be that you've arguably turned a nice free (as in freedom!), open-source-tool into a vehicle to push more or less proprietary and user-tracking code onto naive, unknowing users

I respectfully disagree. First, the decision was not only mine, but from our team and community (see my post just above yours). Second, you are not losing any freedom by simply dismissing our message to take a look at Kite. And third, Kite doesn't track our users.

> Why make it a nagscreen (not sure about the extent of that), if you could just make it an option or a status message.

This is quite common in Hacker News: you're criticizing us without knowing how this works. We only show a message about Kite once. Then we show another message in the editor *if* our code completion machinery can't provide completions but Kite does. Both can be dismissed with a single click, that's it. These features are annoying for the user that started this thread because their settings are reset every day.

> For me you're now just competing with every proprietary python IDE

We are effectively competing with other editors and IDEs, with or without Kite. If giving the chance to (not forcing) our users to have better code completions makes us more competitive, I'm all for it.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, this is the thing: code completion in Python is not a a simple task and we've struggled for years to improve it. Now we support the Language Server Protocol (designed by Microsoft for VSCode), but still things are not great, i.e. there are many things that can't be completed by Jedi, specially for scientific libraries. So, thanks to Kite's software, we implemented a client for it and now lightly promote it to o…

> 147 Votes in 606 days

At the time we did that poll we had ~1000 followers on Twitter, so that's 15% of our audience, which is pretty good for an online poll.

But more important than that, we receive ~200 issues per month on Github (which makes us one of the projects in the PyData stack with higher values on this metric) and I don't remember a single one since we rolled out this feature that argued strongly to remove it. So either people dismiss our suggestion, or try it and decide if they like or not.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#155

If you regularly use Spyder, what is it specifically that you like about it? I had pretty much thought it was just a tool for people who normally work in R and Matlab to ease into python. Which I totally understand, but is there more to it? It is purely for scientific programming, or do people use it for other things too? Like would you ever write a Django app with it? What am I missing out on by not using it? For my…

I admit that I use it mainly because of all the nice code checking. I've been programming for 40 years, mostly "scientific," but have never made effective use of an IDE. So this is a new experience for me. With the guidance of a couple of colleagues, I'm bring myself up to date on writing quality code.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#156

I like spyder a lot for the variable explorer, which makes it feel more like Matlab. However the constant bothering about installing Kite got annoying. Unfortunately there isn't a way to use Kite and have it not constantly annoy you about upgrading to the enterprise edition. If Kite had a no ads plan for like ~ $10 a year it would make a lot more sense to integrate it in spyder.

Also, never forget that they've bought out Atom extensions in the past to insert promotions for Kite.

https://github.com/atom-minimap/minimap/issues/588#issuecomm...

https://github.com/autocomplete-python/autocomplete-python/i...

Edit: Related HN thread with ~400 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be nice, my dev environment gets wiped every night, so I see the message everyday. That and the one time I did install Kite, Kite kept bothering me about buying some enterprise plan. I do appreciate the work you do on Spyder though!

Great! It's too late for us to include it in our next version (4.2.2), but we'll definitely consider it for Spyder 5.0, to be released in April.

Thank you for replying to posts on this topic and for all your work on Spyder.

The following is simply an FYI, not a complaint - I am very thankful for all that the open source community does on projects like Spyder.

I've used Spyder for quick tasks for many years but only use it rarely now due to the string formatting in the console.

Just this morning I copied a lot of text from the supplementary data of a paper, pasted it into Spyder, processed it, and output it to a nice tab separated table in the console. In other IDEs, I can copy that output and put it straight into my file and it works perfectly but Spyder now replaces all the tabs with spaces. That might be OK if the output were all numbers but the output has descriptions and then numbers in different columns so I end up having to output to a file instead of the console to get something usable. A minor issue, but it negates the value of a lightweight IDE.

In the past I had a lot of issues with unicode in Spyder where the exact same code worked well in command line python and in other IDEs.

Because of these types of issues I find that I'm better off just going to my heavyweight IDE instead of Spyder even for simple tasks if I don't want to do them from the command line.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! It's too late for us to include it in our next version (4.2.2), but we'll definitely consider it for Spyder 5.0, to be released in April.

Thank you for replying to posts on this topic and for all your work on Spyder. The following is simply an FYI, not a complaint - I am very thankful for all that the open source community does on projects like Spyder. I've used Spyder for quick tasks for many years but only use it rarely now due to the string formatting in the console. Just this morning I copied a lot of text from the supplementary data of a paper, pa…

You're probably using an old version of Spyder because this problem was fixed a long time ago:

https://github.com/jupyter/qtconsole/pull/397

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#159

I like spyder a lot for the variable explorer, which makes it feel more like Matlab. However the constant bothering about installing Kite got annoying. Unfortunately there isn't a way to use Kite and have it not constantly annoy you about upgrading to the enterprise edition. If Kite had a no ads plan for like ~ $10 a year it would make a lot more sense to integrate it in spyder.

Also, never forget that they've bought out Atom extensions in the past to insert promotions for Kite. https://github.com/atom-minimap/minimap/issues/588#issuecomm... https://github.com/autocomplete-python/autocomplete-python/i... Edit: Related HN thread with ~400 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836653

We were aware of that and very careful to not allow something like it for Spyder users.

Re: Spyder – a free and open source scientific environment written in Python

#160

If you regularly use Spyder, what is it specifically that you like about it? I had pretty much thought it was just a tool for people who normally work in R and Matlab to ease into python. Which I totally understand, but is there more to it? It is purely for scientific programming, or do people use it for other things too? Like would you ever write a Django app with it? What am I missing out on by not using it? For my…

I admit that I use it mainly because of all the nice code checking. I've been programming for 40 years, mostly "scientific," but have never made effective use of an IDE. So this is a new experience for me. With the guidance of a couple of colleagues, I'm bring myself up to date on writing quality code.

Thanks for your remarks! I think they are a testament to what we're really trying to: provide a comfortable environment to do scientific computing that also has the nice features you can find in IDEs designed for professional software developers.
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