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Comment by greatgoat420 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

but why is that even there? I guess that's just another reason to stay with emacs...

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 our users, to offer them a possibility that works better, but it's completely optional.

We also consulted our community before adding Kite integration and they were favorable to it, that's why we decided to proceed with the idea: https://twitter.com/Spyder_IDE/status/1138466325532217346

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 and guix/nix-sympathiser here). Why make it a nagscreen (not sure about the extent of that), if you could just make it an option or a status message.

For me you're now just competing with every proprietary python IDE, which basically drops you of my list of tools to use or recommend (one can also use free PyCharm or VSCode or RStudio then, where you know, what you get...)

> 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.

I can attest to that kite was only promoted once to me through anaconda... However, kite itself has gone above and beyond to try and nag me into buying their enterprise edition - it's only just made me hate the software.

It will suggest "" completions at the top of the list, even for incredibly mundane completions, which is apparently a "premium completion" which almost immediately results in a nagging popup that requests that we purchase the enterprise edition because "you are out of your daily premium completions". If anything, I wish the spyder team would completely disallow kite to push their product in that kind of way, because it completely goes against what open-source projects stand for.

> 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.

Sponsoring/buying things in exchange for kite promotion seems to be their MO - there was quite a bit of noise about the more brazen instances of it a while back when the used existing editor extensions to push their product or telemetry code (see e.g. https://theoutline.com/post/1953/how-a-vc-funded-company-is-... and HN discussions about "kite")

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.

(Spyder maintainer here) Kite is completely optional for Spyder. If you don't like it, you can uninstall it and Spyder will continue working without any issues.

Is there an option to not install Kite in the first place?

I don't understand your question. Kite doesn't come pre-installed with Spyder. We only show a dialog once informing users that Spyder can use Kite to improve code completions in our editor.

After that, if a completion can't be provided by Jedi but it could by Kite, we show another message, which can dismissed entirely.

Both things don't force you to install Kite, but also show a button in case you want to do it within Spyder.

I have installed Spyder both from its own repo, and using Anaconda, and I don't have Kite. I don't recall doing anything special during installation.

Thanks for the confirmation @buo. There's really nothing special about installing Spyder, i.e. we don't install Kite behind the scenes or anything like that.

The issue isn't it installing Kite, it is the messages about installing Kite that bothered me.

As I said, it's a two times thing, but if it bothers you so much, we could a command line option to disable those messages completely. Would that be ok?

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!

I’m not sure if it’s really fair to complain about seeing a two time post install message all the time because you effectively uninstall and reinstall the software everyday, or at the least not without disclosing that your environment isn’t what most people use.

I mean, presumably GP has a reason. Adding a command line option, as seems to be happening, strikes me as a perfectly logical solution.

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.

Awesome! I also suffer from this -- the public terminals at my university always start from a fresh install and these sort of nags are everywhere.

I really wish more software companies would re-think the startup nags all together. It is easy to say that 'oh we only show it once' but honestly who only installs a piece of software once in their life? I have probably clicked through the onboarding for microsofts browsers literally a thousand times now and I don't even work in IT. A typical user probably at least a dozen if not more, per piece of software...

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.

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

You are amazing, thank you for being so responsive!

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

Thanks for the info. I stopped using Spyder over the annoying and distracting promotions. This confirms my feelings about it.

It is also time consuming to properly install from source, via GitHub, versus Anaconda. It does have a learning curve in that sense, even for someone pretty experienced.

I am currently using Atom. I may switch to Sublime Text and add extensions to make it a Python IDE.

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

I mean, the point isn't that Kite can't succeed at integrating with third party tools in less user-hostlile ways. The point is that I'm not touching Kite with a thousand-foot pole after what they've done in the past. The trust has been lost. And the idea that it "nags" you to install Kite seems to indicate that money has traded hands somewhere, as in this is an advertisement. It just seems like much the same as before.

Constant? I only got asked once, on first use. I said no. I still consider it a bit rude in an open source program though.

They funded us to implement this feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26042582

But we also consider it a nice suggestion to our users, for a feature they've asked for years to make more reliable and robust.

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