Overview — Spyder 2.3 documentation

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# Overview

Spyder is a Python development environment with the following key features:

Key features:

- general features:
  - MATLAB-like PYTHONPATH management dialog box (works with all consoles)
  - Windows only: current user environment variables editor
  - direct links to documentation (Python, Matplotlib, !NumPy, !Scipy, etc.)
  - direct link to Python(x,y) launcher
  - direct links to !QtDesigner, !QtLinguist and !QtAssistant (Qt documentation)
- preferences dialog box:
  - keyboard shortcuts
  - syntax coloring schemes (source editor, history log, object inspector)
  - console: background color (black/white), automatic code completion, etc.
  - and a lot more...
- Editor:
  - syntax coloring (Python, C/C++, Fortran)
  - breakpoints and conditional breakpoints (debugger: pdb)
  - run or debug Python scripts (see console features)
  - run configuration dialog box:
    - working directory
    - command line options
    - run in a new Python interpreter or in an existing Python interpreter or IPython client
    - Python interpreter command line options
  - code outline explorer: functions, classes, if/else/try/... statements
  - powerful code introspection features (powered by rope):
    - code completion
    - calltips
    - go-to-definition: go to object (any symbol: function, class, attribute, etc.) definition by pressing Ctrl+Left mouse click on word or Ctrl+G (default shortcut)
  - occurence highlighting
  - typing helpers (optional):
    - automatically insert closing parentheses, braces and brackets
    - automatically unindent after ‘else’, ‘elif’, ‘finally’, etc.
  - to-do lists (TODO, FIXME, XXX)
  - errors/warnings (real-time code analysis provided by pyflakes)
  - integrated `pylint` code analysis
  - direct link to winpdb external debugger
- Console:
  - all consoles are executed in a separate process
  - code completion/calltips and automatic link to object inspector (see below)
  - open Python interpreters or basic terminal command windows
  - run Python scripts (see source editor features)
  - variable explorer:
    - GUI-based editors for a lot of data types (numbers, strings, lists, arrays, dictionaries, ...)
    - import/export data from/to a lot of file types (text files, !NumPy files, MATLAB files)
    - multiple array/list/dict editor instances at once, thus allowing to compare variable contents
    - data visualization
- History log
- Object inspector:
  - provide documentation or source code on any Python object (class, function, module, ...)
  - documentation may be displayed as an html page thanks to the rich text mode (powered by sphinx)
- Online help: automatically generated html documentation on installed Python modules
- Find in files: find string occurences in a directory, a mercurial repository or directly in PYTHONPATH (support for regular expressions and included/excluded string lists)
- Explorer
- Project Explorer (support Pydev project import)

Spyder may also be used as a PyQt4 or PySide extension library (module ‘spyderlib’). For example, the Python interactive shell widget used in Spyder may be embedded in your own PyQt4 or PySide application.

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