DRAFT: this page has not been completely updated from Spyder v1.1 to v2.0
The Spyder console run programs (Python interpreter or system terminal) in a separate process:
- Run Python scripts
- Open Python interpreters
- Open IPython interpreters
- Open terminals (terminals have quite limited features so GNU/Linux users will certainly prefer to use the system terminal instead)
Python/IPython interpreters (or running Python scripts) support the following features:
- Variable explorer
- Debugging with pdb
- Code completion and calltips
- User Module Deleter
When enabled, the User Module Deleter (UMD) force the Python interpreter to reload modules completely when executing import statements. This feature is however disabled by default because some modules may be not work properly with it.
When enabled, this option will systematically reload imported modules since its activation. In other words, if you would like some modules to be loaded only once, you may import them before enabling the option.
The following special commands are supported by the interactive console.
Edit script
edit foobar.py will open foobar.py with Spyder’s editor. xedit foobar.py will open foobar.py with the external editor.
Execute script
run foobar.py will execute foobar.py in interactive console.
Remove references
clear x, y will remove references named x and y.
Shell commands
!cmd will execute system command cmd (example !ls on Linux or !dir on Windows).
Python help
object? will show object‘s help in documentation viewer.
GUI-based editor
oedit(object) will open an appropriate GUI-based editor to modify object object and will return the result.
The workspace is a global variable browser for the interactive console with the features described below.
The following screenshots show some interesting features such as editing lists, strings, dictionaries, NumPy arrays, or plotting/showing NumPy arrays data.
The default Workspace configuration allows to browse global variables without slowing the interactive console even with very large NumPy arrays, lists or dictionaries. The trick is to truncate values, to hide collection contents (i.e. showing ‘<list @ address>’ instead of list contents) and to show only mininum and maximum values for NumPy arrays (see context menu options on the screenshot at the top of this page).
However, most of the time, choosing the opposite options won’t have too much effect on interactive console’s performance:
