Why is Spyder so slow in OS X? Is there a way to make it faster?

Question

I have Spyder installed as part of the Anaconda Python analytics package and I'm finding the editor to be very slow. There's always a half-second lag time between key presses and the letter showing up on screen. I'm using Spyder on a fairly new i7 MacBook.

Answer 1

This problem is generated by Qt, the graphical library Spyder is built upon. Not only Spyder but all applications that use Qt have shown this problem.

A detailed explanation of the problem can be found here where we are also trying to find a a solution.

Answer 2

As Carlos mentioned, the problem is currently with Qt. Over the past couple months, people have found a workaround (answer #29) as the folks at Homebrew have a working distribution. People have found success installing qt on Mavericks with brew install pyqt and then installing spyder through pip with pip install spyder. That said, it seems that anaconda uses it's own version of Qt, so I haven't figured out yet how to get it working for the anaconda distribution. It seems either some sort of linking could work, or someone could create a conda package with a working pyqt in it.