Early Access Program Releases

PyCharm 2017.3 EAP Starts now: scientific mode, and more

At JetBrains, we believe it’s important to involve our customers at an early stage. Before releasing a new version, we test our software to make sure everything works well. However, in software development there are as many unique configurations as there are developers. Therefore we provide Early Access Preview (EAP) versions free of charge, so you can make sure all of our improvements work in your environment prior to release.

We’d like to invite you to download the first EAP version of PyCharm 2017.3 now, it’s available from our website.

Please let us know how you like it! You can submit feedback from within PyCharm, by leaving a comment on the blog, or by reaching out to us on Twitter. If you run into any issues in the EAP, please create a ticket on YouTrack.

New in this version: Scientific Mode

More and more Python developers are doing scientific development, and we’ve created a new feature especially for them. When we detect that you use a scientific package in your project (like numpy or pandas), we will suggest to enable scientific mode:

PyCharm 2017.3 Scientific Mode

If you chose not to use scientific mode when we asked, you can always enable it later in View | Scientific Mode.

In this mode, we open several tool windows by default: the Python console (bottom left), a variable viewer (bottom right), and a documentation viewer (top right).

The new scientific mode makes exploring data a lot easier: you always have an overview of the variables in your current session, and we look up the documentation of the method you’re using as you’re typing. No longer will you need to have your browser open with 20 tabs just to find the details about Pandas methods. In other words: you can focus on your data, rather than the details of the library you’re using.

New Features

  • You can now configure exception breakpoints to be conditional, or to evaluate a statement and log

Conditional Exception Breakpoint

  • For those who want to install PyPI packages into Conda envs, we’ve added PyPI and Conda Modes for the PyCharm Package Manager. Simply click the Conda button on the right to switch between Conda and PyPI mode:

Conda Package Management

Further Fixes and Improvements

  • We now correctly identify test classes, even if they have methods that don’t start with `test_`
  • Many inspections and autocomplete fixes, for example we’ve improved a couple of cases where we misinterpreted __all__, and we resolved some NamedTuple issues
  • Bugs involving Twisted Trial
  • Some improvements to editing BDD feature and step files
  • Various performance improvements

To see the full list of improvements, see the release notes of PyCharm 2017.3 EAP 1

Excited to try these new features yourself? Download PyCharm 2017.3 EAP 1 now

As always, EAP versions of PyCharm Professional Edition are free of charge, and will work for 30 days from the day of the release. If you upgrade regularly during the EAP program, you will be able to use PyCharm Professional Edition for free for the entire duration.

-PyCharm Team
The Drive to Develop

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