pymmcore-plus is a new Python ecosystem designed for controlling microscopes via the open-source Micro-Manager software. At its heart lies the pymmcore-plus package, which extends pymmcore—the original Python 3.x bindings for the C++ Micro-Manager core. By eliminating Java dependencies (as pymmcore does), pymmcore-plus ensures seamless operation in a pure Python environment, offering a streamlined and modern alternative for microscope control. A key feature is its multi-dimensional acquisition engine implemented in pure Python that facilitates "on-the-fly" image processing and image analysis and enables "smart microscopy" capabilities. Since the pymmcore-plus package does not rely on the Java Graphical User Interface (GUI), we also developed a related package named pymmcore-widgets which provides a collection of Qt-based widgets that can be used in combination with pymmcore-plus to create custom GUIs (e.g. napari-micromanager, micromanager-gui, pymmcore-gui, pymmcore-plus-sandbox, …).