Autocomplete not working in editor

Description of your problem

Autocomplete stopped working in the Spyder editor (it worked before, but no longer).

What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Fresh install of Spyder and upgrade all dependencies
2. Reset Spyder to factory settings
3. Type the following in a new file:

jannie = ‘aaa’ jann

(Followed by CTRL + SPACE to activate autocomplete). Nothing happens. No output in Python console.

Also, no results when attempting auto-complete for built-in modules, functions, etc.

If I go to Consoles -> Open a Python Console and do the same, then autocomplete does work.

I can confirm that CTRL + SPACE also works correctly in the Sublime Text editor.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Expected popup of autocomplete dialog. No popup appeared.

Please provide any additional information below

The following settings are enabled in Preferences -> Editor -> Code Introspection/Analysis:

• Display balloon tips

• Automatic code completion

• Case sensitive code completion

• Enter key selects completion

• Link to object definition

• Real-time code analysis

• Real-time code style analysis

• Code annotations

• Perform analysis when saving file and every 2500 ms

Versions and main components

• Spyder Version: 3.1.4
• Python Version: 3.6.0 32bits
• Qt Version: 5.7.1
• PyQt Version: PyQt5 5.7.1
• Operating system: Windows 10

Dependencies

Please go to the menu entry Help > Optional Dependencies (or Help > Dependencies), press the button Copy to clipboard and paste the contents below:

jedi >=0.9.0 : 0.10.2 (OK) matplotlib >=1.0 : None (NOK) nbconvert >=4.0 : 5.2.1 (OK) numpy >=1.7 : None (NOK) pandas >=0.13.1 : None (NOK) pep8 >=0.6 : 1.7.0 (OK) pyflakes >=0.6.0 : 1.5.0 (OK) pygments >=2.0 : 2.2.0 (OK) pylint >=0.25 : 1.7.1 (OK) qtconsole >=4.2.0: 4.3.0 (OK) rope >=0.9.4 : 0.10.5 (OK) sphinx >=0.6.6 : 1.6.2 (OK) sympy >=0.7.3 : 1.0 (OK)

[shaktikshri]

sad to say but spyder has by far proven to be the most unstable IDE I ever used. Have been trying to fix things around since morning and stuff keeps breaking one after the other. And now I am again trying to look for why autocomplete isn’t working 😦 This is not the first time this issue has happened, seems more like Spyder’s internal decision decides when autocomplete should work and when not depending on the day of the week.

[ccordoba12]

Thanks for reporting. This is a duplicate of issue #4410.

We still don’t know why but autocompletion is working fine for Anaconda users and broken for some users that don’t use it.

So my suggestion is to use Anaconda instead of your own Python installation, if possible.