Basics of setting up a Spyder workspace and projects
I have searched for a basic tutorial regarding workspaces and projects in the Spyder IDE. What I want to understand is the basic concepts of how to use the workspace and projects to organize my code. It seems that this is perhaps basic programming skills and that is the reason why I have issues finding any kind of overview. This page seems to be related, but is actually about Eclipse and rather sparse. The Pythonxy tutorial and the documentation for Spyder does not go into any detail. Neither does the Anaconda documentation.
The questions I have are:
When should I set up a new workspace (if ever)?
When do I create a new project?
How does the PYTHONPATH depend on my workspace and project settings? Is it the same in all cases or can I customize it per workspace/project?
Are there other settings apart from the PYTHONPATH that I should configure?
How specific are the answers above to Spyder? Would it be the same for other IDEs, like Eclipse?
I am running Spyder on 64-bit Windows 7, as part of the Anaconda package.
Answer
In my experience, setting up a workspace in Spyder is not always necessary. A workspace is a space on your computer where you create and save all the files you work in. Workspaces usually help in managing your project files. Once you create a workspace in Spyder, a pane called "Project Explorer" opens up inside Spyder. There you see in real-time the files of your project. For instance, if you generate a file with Python, it will show in that pane. The pane let's you keep the files organized, filter them etc. This can be useful for web development for example because helps you keep your content organized. I use Python to handle files (e.g. csv) and work with data (data analysis), and I find no use in the workspace feature. Moreover, if you delete a file in the Project Explorer pane, the file cannot be found in the Windows recycle bin.