Spyder – Scientific Python Development Environment | Hacker News Reader

Spyder – Scientific Python Development Environment

code.google.com

72 pointsrbanffy29 comments

Windows users can also consider Visual Studio + Python Tools [1]. Another multiplatform alternative is Enthought's Canopy (Free Academic License) [2]. I consider both to be superior alternatives to Spyder for scientific python usage. And of course the iPython notebook [3] which is my favorite alternative but you still can't easily inspect the variables, I hope it comes soon with the javascript enhancements.

I appreciate the great effort behind Spyder but I think the UI and the documentation, website etc lack a lot of polishing and attention. I have tried it a couple times and I never get around simple things, like installing packages and the environment.

[1] http://pytools.codeplex.com

[2] https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/

[3] http://ipython.org/notebook.html

Please use Continuum's Anaconda (multiplatform), Python(x,y) or WinPython (Windows only) if you want to have a full scientific distribution that also comes with Spdyer. I you're on Mac, you can also download our dmg [1], which has the most important scientific libs preinstalled. At the moment we don't provide a way to install packages with Spyder but I'm thinking to build one on top of conda (Anaconda's package manager).

I agree with your complaint about our docs, they are very minimal indeed. What we have tried to do is to make our interface as easy to understand as possible to compensate that fact. But I'll try to improve them.

If you find elements of our UI not polished enough, please post a message in our mailing list with a detailed explanation, this is very important to us. For example, I fixed most of the complaints on this blog post [2], which helped us to improve a lot our UI.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/downloads/list

[2] http://xcorr.net/2013/04/17/evaluating-ides-for-scientific-p...

I use spyder with Scipy and it generally works quite well. Normally I am a vim user and do not like IDEs, but Spyder make switching between data, sources and repl really neat.

On the other hand, only with spyder I get that many annoying trailing spaces for some reaseon.

Yep, sorry about that. You can kill those trailing spaces though by setting

Automatically remove trailing spaces when saving files

Tools > Preferences > Editor > Advanced Settings > Source code

I can't really relate to all the other great IDE's out there for Python, but in the scientific context I think Spyder makes a lot of sense. It tries to create a comfortable environment for scientists with a limited background on computer science. Especially for the more GUI oriented users, it is great to have a visual on the variables in the workspace with the variable inspector (like Matlab has). Debugging toolbar, object inspector showing rich text documentation (including MathJax rendered formulas), running a multitude of Python or IPython consoles, syntax checking etc makes it for my line of work as a scientist a very decent environment.

There was a nice tutorial given on the SciPy 2013 conference [0] by Carlos Cordoba (the main developer these days for Spyder I believe). What I also think is exciting is that he shows some ideas about how to integrate the IPython notebook in Spyder (last minutes of the talk). Would be interesting to see when that feature further materialize. I think that is a potential killer feature. There are more interesting idea's on further improving Spyder, please ping the mailing list if you are interested in helping out :-)

Besides python(x,y), the WinPython distribution [1] can sometimes offer some installation releave for Windows systems (don't have experience with it as a Linux user though).

@Rickasaurus: When running Spyder straight from source, you can have multiple instances running. Not sure in what context that would be useful besides developing Spyder with Spyder [2] though: python bootstrap.py -- --new-instance

@Derbasti: Spyder does work with Python 3 [3] for the older 2.1 branch. For 2.3 I believe full Python 3 support is also eminent.

[0] http://pyvideo.org/video/2113/the-advantages-of-a-scientific...

[1] https://code.google.com/p/winpython/

[2] http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/wiki/NoteForContributors

[3] http://spyder-ide.blogspot.dk/2013/01/spyder-v2114-supports-...

Disclaimer: I am a tiny and modest Spyder contributor.

Edit: fix layout

Spyder is a really nice interface, but it has one huge problem (on windows at least), you can only have one instance of it open at any given time. It's hugely irritating for experimentation and so mostly I use IPython Notebook these days.

You can however have as many consoles open as you need, and each file can have a unique set of run configurations. This obviates the "experimentation" problem.

I you want to have multiple instances, just go to

Tools > Preferences > General > Interface

and deactivate the option called

Use a single instance

As simple as that. Almost all in Spyder is configurable :)

Does anyone with experience with this IDE have an opinion about whether it is superior to pycharm?

The target audience is very different. Spyder is a kind of Matlab interface replacement, and as such focuses a lot more on interactive aspects. Not sure IDE is even the correct word for it.

Indeed. Spyder is the RStudio[1] of Matplotlib + Scipy.

[1] http://www.rstudio.com/ide/

I used Spyder as a generic python programming tool, then I switched to PyCharm and never looked back.

The problem with Python and its many IDE's is they still rely on textual code visual-sweeping. For example, you see import random but there is no shortcut to browse the random classes and methods. The same with all imported libraries. I am suprised how easily developers approve the old command line evaluator as comfortable. Try to rename several .py files while they are opened in your IDE and see what happens. Unacceptable for this age.

And there is the thing of terminology. Object inspector is just accessing method signature comments and parameter documentation. There is no real dynamic object inspection or retrospection in Python. And its MOP is extremely hard to use compared to other reflective languages. Sorry guys, but Python and IDE's still repeats a lot the same ideas.

Have you tried PyCharm? It does all of these things.

Spyder is great for people coming to python from matlab. I reccommend it a lot to complete beginners, as well.

For those not aware, it's basically an offshoot of python(x,y), which is a really nice python distribution for windows.

Personally, I'm far, far too wedded to vim + ipython to use anything else, but it is _really_ nice to be able to point people using windows to python(x,y). I have nothing against commercial distributions like canopy or anaconda (which offer many advantages), but there are a lot of cases where a freely-redistributable option makes more sense.

Anaconda is completely free to use. It is produced by a commercial entity, but it is completely free.

And by free, he also means free to re-distribute (attribution license). It comes with a very nice package manager (equivalent to brew, yum, apt-get, etc --- but with integrated virtual environments). This package manager BSD-licensed and free to use outside Anaconda as well.

I wasn't aware of that! Thanks! (And thanks for everything you folks do, as well!)

My students this summer used python/numpy/scipy with spyder in place of MATLAB. I was pretty impressed with it overall.

An far as I know Spyder still doesn't support Python 3. Still a decent IDE for scientific Python, though.

2.3 (in beta right now) comes with Python 3 support.

All the scientists I work with (quite a few), swear by IPython Notebook.

The notebook will be integrated in Spyder next year (I have a demo already working). The advantage? Having a much pleasant desktop experience (like the one provided by Mathematica).

It doesn't work on OS X Mavericks.

I'm using version 2.2.4 on Mavericks without a problem

I was using 2.2.5

I tried version 2.2.5 and it worked, but I had to change the permission in the security preferences of OS X. Apparently Mavericks changed the permissions to only allow approved apps to run.

I have changed that, but still I can't launch spyder, because of an error :(

It seems that qt-4 is not supported on Mavericks.

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