ccordoba12

That will be reverted in the next version, i.e. it'll be optional.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

We're working to improve that

Because it'd make everything look huge in non-high DPI displays. It's a trade off, but most people still use them.

Sure, it works with any Python installation/environment that has spyder-kernels installed.

Unfortunately we haven't had time to address that, but it's high in our TODO list. We hope to do it this year.

Thanks for the feedback. That's planned for this year, i.e. to have auto-updating and signed installers (at least on Mac). So stay tuned.

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.

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.

Yeah, updates in Anaconda can be bumpy. That's why we decided to create our own installers for Windows and Mac: https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/releases/tag/v4.2.1

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

> Also, just wanna say Spyder looks like it's come a long way in the last decade. Congrats on some fine work!

Oh yeah, this is so true! Ten years ago, when I joined the project, it was just Pierre (Spyder's original author) and me. Then, in 2016, Anaconda gave us the resources to hire three developers part-time to work on the project, which was a huge boost (between 2012 and 2016 it was mostly me and three or four volunteers).

Now we have a team of five people working part or full time on Spyder, all hired by Quansight: https://www.quansight.com/

So you can expect lots more good things to come in the future.

Thanks a lot for your kind words! And I'm glad to know Spyder works smoothly for you with pip (it's not usually the case).

Too bad you had a bad experience with Kite, but (as I said several times here), it's completely optional.

Yes, you can disable hovers and hints completely. For that you need to go to the menu

    Tools > Preferences

and then

    Completion and linting > Introspection

and disable there "Show calltips" and "Enable hover hints".

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?

Thanks a lot your kind words! I'm really glad you enjoyed using Spyder and have fond memories of it.

Agreed, installing Spyder with pip can lead to a lot of headaches. That's why we don't recommend to use it and suggest Anaconda/conda instead. But that solution also became problematic during the last couple of years (conda is too slow or throws back a huge dependency errors).

That's why we decided to create our own, self-contained installers for Windows and macOS: https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/releases/tag/v4.2.1

Since they are completely isolated and don't come with pip, they can't be broken. And you can connect them to other Python environments by following these instructions: http://docs.spyder-ide.org/current/faq.html#using-existing-e...

Fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience.

Right, we haven't had resources to invest on it, so it's been developed by the community.

It'd be nice if we could use Neovim for text manipulations and show what comes back from it in our editor. If only days had 36 hours...

> The link to the 'editor' page 404s

We just fixed this. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yes, it's written in PyQt and we integrate with a lot of libraries in the Scientific Python ecosystem (Pandas, Sympy, IPython, Matplotlib, Scipy, Cython, etc).

I respectfully disagree. The variable explorer allows to check what variables you have declared and how they change with changes in your code.

This is critical for scientific computing because you're constantly interacting with data (i.e. reading, cleaning, plotting and analyzing it), so having a dedicated pane for it is a great advantage.

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.

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.

(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.

Yes, we definitely improved on that front. Spyder should be more responsive now.

You should give it a try with our new installers for Windows and macOS, which save you the trouble of installing Anaconda: https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/releases/tag/v4.2.1