When comparing GitHub for Mac vs Spyder, the Slant community recommends Spyder for most people. In the question“What are the best developer tools for Mac OSX?” Spyder is ranked 24th while GitHub for Mac is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Spyder is:
Released under the MIT license.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great GUI for Github
Pro Free and open-source
Released under the MIT license.
Pro Graph plotting support
Spyder can plot graphs and provide the list of all variables.
Pro Enables to write consistent code
Pylint integration enables to check the code for PEP8 style guide and detect errors.
Pro Powerful autocompletion
Spyder's autocomplete features are made possible by a library called rope which gives Spyder powerful autocompletion.
Pro Has cross platform support - Linux, Mac, and even Windows
Spyder (formerly Pydee) has support for all of the major operating platforms - Linux, Mac, and even Windows.
Pro Helps you to use documentation
Pro Intuitive interface
Pro Relatively lightweight
Pro Has support for Vim bindings via plugin support
Aside from being an open sourced, actively developed IDE, vim key-binding support is also available. If you remember Pydee - this is it, albeit with a new name.
Pro Good GitHub project
Pro Excellent variable explorer
Dynamic variable explorer with editor and visualizer
Pro Completely Python
Cons
Con No support for commit signing
While Github itself offers full support and UI decorators for cryptographically signed commits, the Mac client does not support it, and errors out when trying to commit anything if you have signing enabled.
Con Not beautiful
The default theme is not beautiful. And there are not many themes.
Con The documentation is poor when it comes to debugging
Not a lot of information about debugging is available in the documentation.
Con Consumes a lot of memory
If you're working with large data, especially arrays, another IDE should be considered as spyder uses at least 200-300Mb of memory.