New features request: Automatically search and install plugins

[taoari]

Issue Report Checklist

• Searched the issues page for similar reports
• Read the relevant sections of the Spyder Troubleshooting Guide and followed its advice
• Reproduced the issue after updating with conda update spyder (or pip, if not using Anaconda)
• Could not reproduce inside jupyter qtconsole (if console-related)
• Tried basic troubleshooting (if a bug/error)
  • Restarted Spyder
  • Reset preferences with spyder --reset
  • Reinstalled the latest version of Anaconda
  • Tried the other applicable steps from the Troubleshooting Guide
• Completed the Problem Description, Steps to Reproduce and Version sections below

Problem Description

I found that the plugins system of Spyder is great, you simply need to copy the files to ~/.spyder-py3/plugins folders. However, this process must be done manually. Is it possible to provide a Plugins Panel that you can search and install spyder plugins automatically?

What I mean is something like this: you can simply search a name, find a suitable plugin and click to install the plugin. The following is a screenshot of Sublime Text 3 installing a package Panel for reference.

Versions

• Spyder version: 5.0.5
• Python version:
• Qt version:
• PyQt version:
• Operating System name/version:

Dependencies

PASTE DEPENDENCIES HERE

[ccordoba12]

Hey @taoari, thanks for reporting. This was requested already in spyder-ide/ux-improvements#54 and we'll try to implement it next year.

If a plugin is self-contained, installing it is very simple (as you already discovered). However, since Spyder is written in Python, you can use any Python package for a plugin. In that case, things become more complex and we'd need to implement a package manager for our plugins.

This is an short explanation to let you know why it'll take us some time to address this.

[ccordoba12]

I'm going to close this as a duplicate of issue spyder-ide/ux-improvements#54 to have everything in one place.