Beta version changelog

Version 3.0dev

New features

Main Window

• The Object Inspector pane was renamed to Help.
• Add a new icon theme based on FontAwesome.
• Add an Introduction interactive tutorial (under the Help menu).
• Add new default layouts (Horizontal, Vertical, Matlab and Rstudio), and also the possibility to name custom layouts.
• Panes that are tabbed next to each other can now be rearranged by dragging and dropping their tabs.
• Check for Spyder updates at startup, and also if you go to the menu entry Help > Check for updates.
• Add the shortcut Shift+Alt+R to restart the application.
• Add an option to warn when exiting the application, under Preferences > General > Interface > Prompt when exiting.
• Add Portuguese, Russian and Japanese translations.
• Remove light mode

Editor

• Add highlighting and code completion to all file types supported by Pygments (a syntax highlighting library)
• Use Ctrl+M and Ctrl+Alt+M to visually create matrices and vectors. It also works on the Python and IPython consoles.
• Add a new file switcher inspired by the Sublime Text one, which can be called with the Ctrl+P shortcut. It can also be used to look for classes, functions and methods inside a file, using the @my_function syntax.

Projects:

• A new menu entry called Projects was added to the main window with all actions related to projects.
• A project now saves the state of open files in the Editor, so that people can easily work on different coding efforts at the same time.
• The project's path is added to PYTHONPATH, so that Python packages developed as part of a project can be easily imported in Spyder consoles.
• The project explorer now shows a file tree view of the current project, as other editors and IDEs do (e.g. Sublime Text and VSCode).
• Projects are completely optional and not imposed on users, i.e. users can work without creating any project.

Settings

• Keyboard shortcuts can now be entered in an easier and more intuitive way.
• Add a menu entry to reset to default settings, under Tools > Reset Spyder to factory defaults.
• The language used in the main interface can now be changed. The option to do it is present in General > Advanced Settings.
• Syntax coloring now has a preview of the selected theme and it's able to change the current theme for all plugins.
• Plain and Rich text fonts for all plugins are now changed in General > Appearance.
• Add a new entry called Python interpreter to allow people to select the interpreter used for all Python and IPython consoles (this was before in Console > Advanced settings).
• Rename the Console entry to Python console.

IPython console

• Drop support for IPython 3.0 and older versions.
• Support the new qtconsole package instead.
• Communicate directly with IPython kernels instead of doing it through the Python console.

Debugging

• Enter debugging mode if running a file generates errors. This is not activated by default but you can do it by going to Run > Configure > General settings.

Profiler

• Add the ability to save and restore profiler data to compare speed improvements.

Working directory toolbar

• Get directory completions by pressing the Tab key twice on it.

API Changes

Major changes

• The spyderlib module was renamed to spyder
• spyderplugins has been removed and its plugins have been assigned to different different modules (spyder_profiler, spyder_breakpoints, etc) still distributed with the Spyder package.

Minor changes

• spyderlib.widgets.dicteditor.DictEditor has been renamed to spyder.widgets.variableexplorer.collectionseditor.CollectionsEditor.
• spyderlib/widgets/dicteditorutils.py has been renamed to spyder/widgets/variableexplorer/utils.py.
• spyderlib/widgets/externalshell/namespacebrowser.py has been moved to spyder/widgets/variableexplorer.
• spyderlib/widgets/externalshell/syntaxhighlighters.py has been moved to spyder/utils/.
• Variable Explorer editor widgets were moved from spyderlib.widgets to spyder.widgets.variableexplorer:
  • spyder.widgets.variableexplorer.arrayeditor
  • spyder.widgets.variableexplorer.collectionseditor
  • spyder.widgets.variableexplorer.objecteditor
  • spyder.widgets.variableexplorer.texteditor
  • spyder.widgets.variableexplorer.dataframeeditor
• Modules used for configuration options (e.g. spyderlib.config, spyderlib.baseconfig, etc) were moved to a new namespace called spyder.config.
• Modules and files related to the application have been moved to spyder.app.
• spyderlib/plugins/projectexplorer.py has been renamed to spyder/plugins/projects.py
• spyderlib/widgets/projectexplorer.py has been renamed to spyder/widgets/projects/explorer.py
• spyderlib/plugins/inspector.py was renamed to spyder/plugins/help.py.
• spyderlib/utils/inspector was renamed to spyder/utils/help.
• spyderlib.qt was removed.
• spyderlib/widgets/ipython.py was broken in several files inside spyder/widgets/ipythonconsole.
• spyder/widgets/externalshell/{sitecustomize.py, osx_app_site.py} were moved to spyder/utils/site
• spyder/widgets/externalshell/start_ipython_kernel.py was moved to spyder/utils/ipython

Under the hood

• Drop support for Python 2.6 and 3.2.
• Support PyQt5.
• Drop official support for PySide. Support for it will have to come from the community.
• Move our settings directory to HOME/.spyder{-py3}. Previous location was HOME/.spyder2{-py3}
  • On Linux we now follow the XDG specification to save our settings, i.e. they are saved in ~/.config/spyder{-py3} or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/spyder{-py3} if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined.
• Use the new (pythonic) style for signals and slots.
• Test Spyder with the help of Travis and AppVeyor.
• Code completions and help retrieval on the Editor are done asynchronously using a client/server architecture based on PyZMQ.
• Spyder now uses the qtpy package to be able to work with PyQt4 and PyQt5 seamlessly.