We’re delighted to announce that beta 6 of Mu is here (get it from from the download page)!

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

One of the characteristics of this release is that it contains contributions from several folk who are not regular core members of the volunteer Mu developers team. This is a healthy sign as it proves three things:

  1. Folks see value in and care about Mu.
  2. The Mu project itself is friendly and welcoming to new contributors.
  3. Our codebase is small and simple enough that it’s easy to make changes.

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release. Your work is really appreciated.

So, what’s new?

  • Carlos fixed some packaging problems relating to the iPython kernel bundled with Mu.
  • Martin fixed a couple of problems relating to the stopping of child processes (Flask and scripts stopped via KeyboardInterrupt in Linux).
  • The web mode checks for the availability of templates in the local directory tree before starting up. If a template directory isn’t found in the expected location, then the user sees a helpful message describing the problem and what they need to do to fix it.
  • Mu’s splash screen no longer always appears on top of everything else on the user’s desktop. The splash screen now also logs the progress of installing the various packages needed on first install. Thanks to Carlos for these changes.
  • A new admin/settings option has been added to allow users to manually change the translation Mu uses for its interface. Updating this setting requires a restart of Mu. Zander contributed the icon/glyph to indicate the relevant tab is for translation related settings (not entirely obvious if Mu’s UI is using a language you don’t understand and you’re looking for the setting that relates to translations). The icon makes this clear.
  • On some desktop windowing systems there is a bug that means windows re-open at a position higher up the screen, and so may appear off the top of the screen. We’ve ensured this never happens with Mu. If Mu starts with any part of the window off the screen, the window is moved to be within the dimensions of the screen. This was a weird one to track down and fix.
  • Many thanks to Ethan Spoelstra who contributed a change so Crostini on ChromeOS is used to return the correct CIRCUITPY path if it exists.
  • Huge thanks to Keith Packard for several contributions to this release of Mu. Keith refactored the way in which Mu handles pasting in the REPL window so it works correctly and more broadly across operating systems.
  • Keith also fixed some font related issues in the REPL.
  • Keith was on fire with a couple more contributions relating to SVG icons in the buttons in Mu. We’re very grateful to Ben Williams for putting in the work to make our button icons SVG files. Keith made the code changes to implement this.
  • Thanks to Miro Hrončok for pointing out a change in Python 10 which would break some of our UI calls into PyQt, and who provided a patch to fix things.
  • Some minor clarifications in our developer documentation.

We’re getting close to a 1.1.0-final, with some virtual environment fixes and translation related work remaining to be done.

That’s it..! :-)