[BLOG] Add release-spyder-4beta2 (#607)

Co-authored-by: Noa Tamir <[email protected]>

Author: MarsBarLee

apps/labs/posts/release-spyder-4beta2.md

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+---
+title: 'Spyder 4.0 takes a big step closer with the release of Beta 2!'
+published: May 21, 2019
+author: gonzalo-pena-castellanos
+description: 'This is the first of a series of blog posts we will be writing to showcase updates on the development of Spyder, new planned features and news on the road to Spyder 4.0 and beyond.'
+category: [IDEs]
+featuredImage:
+  src: /posts/release-spyder-4beta2/blog_feature_var1.svg
+  alt: 'An illustration of a brown and a dark brown hand coming towards each other to pass a business card with the logo of Quansight Labs.'
+hero:
+  imageSrc: /posts/release-spyder-4beta2/blog_hero_var1.svg
+  imageAlt: 'An illustration of a brown hand holding up a microphone, with some graphical elements highlighting the top of the microphone.'
+---
+
+It has been almost two months since I joined Quansight in April, to start 
+working on Spyder maintenance and 
+development. So far, it has been a very exciting and rewarding journey under 
+the guidance of long time Spyder maintainer
+[Carlos Córdoba](https://github.com/ccordoba12).
+This is the first of a series of blog posts we will be writing to showcase 
+updates on the development of Spyder, new planned features and news on the 
+road to Spyder 4.0 and beyond.
+
+First off, I would like to give a warm welcome to
+[Edgar Margffoy](https://github.com/andfoy),
+who recently joined Quansight and will be working with the Spyder team to
+take its development even further. Edgar has been a core Spyder developer 
+for more than two years now, and we are very excited to have his (almost)
+full-time commitment to the project.
+
+# Spyder 4.0 Beta 2 released!
+
+Since August 2018, when the first beta of the 4.x series was released, the
+Spyder development team has been working hard on our next release.
+Over the past year, we've implemented the long awaited full-interface dark theme;
+overhauled our entire code completion and linting architecture to use the
+[Language Server Protocol](https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/),
+opening the door to supporting many other languages in the future;
+added a new Plots pane to view and manage the figures generated by your code;
+and numerous other feature enhancements, bug fixes and internal improvements.
+
+## Dark theme
+
+A full-interface dark theme has been a
+[long awaited feature](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/issues/2350),
+and is enabled by default in Spyder 4. You can still select the
+light theme under  ``Preferences > Appearance`` by either choosing a light-background
+syntax-highlighting scheme, or changing ``Interface theme`` to ``Light``.
+
+![Screenshot of the Spyder main window with default panes, with the dark theme applied across the entire interface.](/posts/release-spyder-4beta2/spyder-qdarkstyle.png)
+
+Pretty, right :-) ?
+
+This enhancement was made possible by the work of
+[Colin Duquesnoy](https://github.com/ColinDuquesnoy),
+[Daniel Pizzeta](https://github.com/dpizetta)
+and their [QDarkStyle](https://github.com/ColinDuquesnoy/QDarkStyleSheet/)
+package. The Spyder team is now actively collaborating with Colin and Daniel
+to pursue the release of QDarkStyle 3.x, which will be using Spyder's
+[QtSASS](https://github.com/spyder-ide/qtsass/)
+package to harness the power of SASS/SCSS and allow users to fully customize
+the theme dynamically.
+
+
+## Language Server Protocol architecture
+
+The Language Server Protocol (LSP) was created by Microsoft for Visual Studio Code to standardize how
+development tools (e.g. editors and IDEs) communicate with
+servers that provide code completion, linting and related facilities for
+different programming languages. With LSP, as
+[they describe it](https://web.archive.org/web/20190528210156/https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/):
+
+> A single Language Server can be reused in multiple development tools,
+> which in turn can support multiple languages with minimal effort.
+> LSP is a win for both language providers and tooling vendors!
+
+As of Spyder 4 Beta 2, Spyder is now one of those tools!
+We developed our own client to communicate with any server that implements
+LSP v3.0 through a transport layer that uses ZeroMQ sockets. Code completion,
+help generation, calltips, and real-time code/style analysis were rewritten to take advantage of this
+architecture, and hover hints and docstring style analysis were added.
+Further LSP features, such as workspace functionality and on the fly completion, will come in future betas.
+
+<img src="/posts/release-spyder-4beta2/spyder-hover-hint-calltip.png" class="center" />
+
+Our current support is geared towards Python, using the great
+[Python-Language-Server](https://github.com/palantir/python-language-server)
+package. This has allowed us to provide fine-grained configurability for
+[Pycodestyle](http://pycodestyle.pycqa.org/en/stable/) and
+[Pydocstyle](http://www.pydocstyle.org/en/stable/) options, and in future
+betas we’ll also add the ability to use and configure code formatters like
+YAPF and autopep8.
+
+![Docstring style preferences in Spyder.](/posts/release-spyder-4beta2/spyder-doc-prefs.png)
+
+We support configuring LSP servers for additional, non-Python programming languages.
+In the future, we hope to include out-of-the-box LSP integration for
+some of the most popular languages in the scientific computing space,
+including Fortran, Julia and C/C++.
+
+![Spyder Completion and Linting preferences pane, showing example PyLS servers configured for Go and Julia.](/posts/release-spyder-4beta2/spyder-preferences-lsp.png)
+
+## Plots pane
+
+Similar to [RStudio](https://www.rstudio.com/) and other data science IDEs,
+Spyder now includes a Plots pane, allowing you to browse all figures created during a
+session. Beyond just viewing plots, you can also zoom, save/export, copy and remove
+them.
+
+![Spyder main window with a figure in the plots pane.](/posts/release-spyder-4beta2/spyder-plots.png)
+
+## But wait, there's more!
+
+There are numerous additional features we've added in the previous 10
+months! These include:
+
+* **Autosave** and **File Recovery** in the editor, so Spyder can restore your
+unsaved files in case it crashes or something else goes wrong.
+* Dedicated **Sympy**, **Cython** and **Pylab** consoles, making it
+very simple to quickly explore and create code for these libraries.
+* OS level **window pane undocking**, allowing you to easily
+organize panes across different monitors.
+* Support for **[multi-indexes](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/user_guide/advanced.html)**
+in our Dataframe viewer, making working with complex datasets much easier.
+
+We will describe all of these additional enhancements in greater detail in
+future blog posts.
+
+## You can help!
+
+If would like to help us test this beta release and try out the new features it offers,
+you can! You can install it with ``conda`` (if using Anaconda/Miniconda, as we recommend),
+or with ``pip``; we suggest doing so in a new Conda env or ``virtualenv``/``venv``
+so you can easily switch between your existing Spyder install and the Spyder 4 beta.
+For example, to do so with ``conda``, enter the following at the Terminal/Anaconda prompt:
+
+```bash
+$ conda create --channel spyder-ide --name spyder-beta spyder=4.0.0b2
+$ conda activate spyder-beta
+$ spyder
+```
+
+This is a safe process because Spyder now uses a different configuration
+directory for its development versions, so you can easily switch between our stable
+and beta releases without worrying about one affecting the other.
+
+If you find any bugs, you can report them on our
+[issue tracker](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/issues);
+make sure to search for your error message or behavior before making a new one.
+
+## Closing remarks
+
+I would like to thank Quansight for the opportunity of working in open source
+development on an awesome project like Spyder. I am also grateful to our
+users, [contributors](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/graphs/contributors)
+and [core developers](https://github.com/orgs/spyder-ide/people) for helping
+making Spyder amazing!