Beta 5 is here (get it from the download page)!

Since this is a beta release and may contain bugs or unfinished features. Please provide bug reports or feedback via GitHub.

We had hoped for a regular (fortnightly) release tempo. Due to the voluntary nature of Mu’s development and because some of the updates in this release were quite challenging (see below), this release is a LOT later than we had planned.

  • Several of us made minor updates and fixes (such as ensuring various packages had explicit dependency versions listed, updating versions for Mu’s own dependencies and so on).
  • Right clicking on highlighted text in the editor, with the REPL active, now has an additional option added to the context menu: to correctly paste the text from the editor into the REPL. Thanks to Professor Chris Rogers of Tufts University for suggesting this feature.
  • The multi-talented Dan Halbert of Adafruit very kindly fixed a bug in the Adafruit board handling when on run on new Apple M1 hardware. Thank you Dan for your valuable contribution.
  • A huge amount of work by Tim and Carlos has gone into analysing the crash reports from recent beta releases of Mu. This has resulted in significant effort to address many of the bugs encountered, many of which related to edge cases encountered by the new virtual environment feature. Tim and Carlos have created many fixes and checks to ensure these bugs are either completely fixed or are, at least, mitigated in more helpful ways. This has been a challenging and “fiddly” bit of work, so kudos and thanks, as always, to both Tim and Carlos for their continued efforts.
  • Carlos has also updated the version of MicroPython used in the BBC micro:bit mode to the latest 2.0.0-beta.5 version.
  • In addition, Carlos has ensured that the micro:bit mode flashes files onto the micro:bit using the correctly memory aligned hex string.
  • Github user ajs256 has ensured the crash reporter doesn’t kick in when a KeyboardInterrupt is triggered in Mu (CTRL-C).
  • Sometimes in Mu for Linux, the expected .py file extension wasn’t added to new files. This depended on the user’s graphical shell. Mu now checks the output from the shell and, if requires, will add .py itself.
  • Various fixes to Mu’s logging make it more robust, clear and useful.
  • Tiago fixed a late breaking bug in packaging Mu for OSX. All fixed in a matter of hours. Amazing work!

There are perhaps a couple more features we want to land in the coming weeks, and then we will start the work of ensuring internationalization is fully up to date, the website reflects the new features and various changes, and PUP will be able to produce redistributable appimages for Linux.

Then we will have reached 1.1.0-final. :-)