Welcome to Spyder's Blog
Spyder has received a two-year grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to add remote development capabilities to our beloved IDE. This means you'll be able to easily take advantage of the vast resources offered by HPC clusters or the cloud to execute your code, while working from the comfort of your personal computer. And if you're interested in helping us implement that, we may have just the job opportunity for you!
Spyder 5.4.0 was released recently, featuring some major enhancements to the Windows and macOS standalone installers. You'll now get more detailed feedback when new versions are available, and you can download and start the update to them from right within Spyder, instead of having to install them manually. Read on to learn how these new update features work and how to use them.
The third-party Spyder-Watchlist plugin is introduced, which can display and continually update the values of arbitrary, user-defined expressions while the debugger is active, and it's shown how to use this powerful tool for quickly exploring and debugging your code.
We'd like to share our brand new roadmap for the rest of 2022, powered by the feedback of users like you. We're also excited to announce two new grants we've been awarded, which fund significant improvements to Spyder's Windows installers and user/developer documentation.
IPython is a great improvement over the standard Python interpreter, bringing many enhancements such as autocompletion and "magic" commands. When debugging, however, many of these features become inaccessible. With Spyder, we aim to bring back these capabilities and more for a truly premium debugging experience! (And believe me, I use this debugger a lot, and not only because I write code that might contain bugs :p).
STX Next, one of Europe's largest Python development companies, has shared with us how Spyder has been a powerful tool for them when performing data analysis. It is a pleasure for us on the Spyder team to work every day to improve the workflow of developers, scientists, engineers and data analysts. We are very glad to receive and share a STX Next testimonial about Spyder, along with an interview with one of their developers, Michael Wiśniewski, who has found Spyder very useful in his job.
I joined the Spyder team almost two years ago, and I never thought I was going to end up working on docs. Six months ago I started a project with CAM Gerlach and Carlos Cordoba to improve Spyder’s documentation. At first, I didn’t actually understand how important docs are for software, especially for open source projects. However, during all this time I’ve learned how documentation has a huge impact on the open-source community and I’ve been thankful to have been able to do this. But, from the beginning, I asked myself “why am I the ‘right person’ for this?”
After more than three years in development and more than 5000 commits from 60 authors around the world, Spyder 4 finally saw the light on December 5, 2019! I decided to wait until now to write a blogpost about it because shortly after the initial release, we found several critical performance issues and some regressions with respect to Spyder 3, most of which are fixed now in version 4.1.3, released on May 8th 2020.
The Spyder-Terminal project is revitalized! The new 0.3.0 version adds numerous features that improve the user experience, and enhances compatibility with the latest Spyder 4 release, in part thanks to the improvements made in the xterm.js project.
Spyder 4 will be released very soon with lots of interesting new features that you'll want to check out, reflecting years of effort by the team to improve the user experience. In this post, we will be talking about the improvements made to the Variable Explorer.