Hydrogen: Improve toggle-inspector

[Darktex]

I like the Inspector a lot, and I think it would be great if it just showed up automatically, or if at least there was a keybinding to allow me to toggle it for a specific function without the need to go on the Internet and lose my flow.

[lgeiger]

In the latest release we changed the behaviour of the inspector.

You can define a custom keyboard shortcut for yourself by adding

'atom-text-editor':
  'cmd-ctrl-i': 'hydrogen:toggle-inspector',

to your Atom keymaps file.

https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter_client/issues/51 will allow us to incorporate the introspection result in the autocompletion in the future.

[lgeiger]

@matthew-brett mentioned a similar behavior on slack.

We could update the Inspector on every cursor movement (or keyboard stroke) if it is open.
@rgbkrk @n-riesco Would this amount of inspect requests be OK?

Spyder also has an inspector. Does anyone know how they are handling the updating?

[rgbkrk]

It depends on if inspect has a side effect on the object. I think for the Python kernel it's likely not too bad. Worth exploring to see!

[matthew-brett]

Aha - yes - doing automatic inspection could trigger all sorts of nasty stuff, such as on-the-fly attribute creation and so on. How about a double click and / or a by-default keyboard shortcut?

[n-riesco]

Another issue with automatic inspection is that it may be an expensive operation (it's up to the kernel to decide how to honour detail_level). For example, IPython with detail_level set to 0 truncates the representation of large arrays. IJavascript, on the other hand, doesn't.

[Trollgeir]

Several other of my colleagues say that the most sought-after feature hydrogen is lacking is the object inspector similar to the one Spyder has. In essence; showing the content of all variables at all times in a scrollable list.

[BenRussert]

@Trollgeir Have you tried the add watch functionality?

[Trollgeir]

I have occasionally used the watch functionality, but this requires double declaration of variables (one in the code, one in the watch). It would be handy if there would be a functionality that does this automatically, unless I misunderstood some parts of the functionality?

[kylebarron]

What would others think about a PR that implements introspection as a tooltip? I'm thinking of something similar to the tooltip shown in @lgeiger's ide-python package. It could be turned off in the settings if desired (i.e. if introspection takes too long).

[BenRussert]

@kylebarron that looks like it could be a really nice enhancement! Since the original issue is not so specific to this, I think we should close and move your last comment to discuss in a new issue. Make sure to mention Lukas again when you open, I'd love to get his thoughts.

[kylebarron]

Will do. Wasn't sure whether to comment or add a new issue.

[kylebarron]

@BenRussert up to you whether to close this issue.

[BenRussert]

On the original topic, I am closing as I think automatically triggering inspect requests and rendering them would cause performance issues and possibly other side effects. Convieniently , one could develop a hydrogen plugin using kernel middleware to handle inspect requests and responses in a custom way.

You can also trigger inspect as needed with a keyboard shortcut, user customized if desired.