Emacs setup for Python development

by rachbelaid • 13 years ago

112 54 13 years ago

The author seems to imply that sublime does not qualify as a "serious" editor, and offers a link to quora as explanation, but the article there doesn't address what Sublime is missing at all.

codewright3• 13 years ago

>doesn't address what Sublime is missing at all.

Being a fully programmable work environment.

Edit: I used ST2 for about a month. The Python was neat but it's going to fade away eventually.

FuzzyDunlop• 13 years ago

Vim and Emacs have had decades to get to that point. ST is a comparative baby. I'd love to see a modern editor that isn't designed around a terminal join those ranks.

tomsthumb3• 13 years ago

What can't you do with ST2 if you write a plugin? Or is that just a relative pain compared to emacs & vim?

mrgoldenbrown5• 13 years ago

Can you give a specific example of how being "fully programmable" improves your workflow?

adamors• 13 years ago

It's hip to hate Sublime because it can't do X that Emacs or Vim can. There's a lot of criticism of ST by people who never actually used it or used it for a couple of minutes. Pathetic really.

serjeem• 13 years ago

I haven't seen a lot of hate in that direction. As someone who uses ST almost primarily, my biggest complaint is that it's not open source and free, which is going to stunt it's growth and keep it from being a real competitor with Emacs or Vim.

username111• 13 years ago

I use sublime for WordPress because it doesn't use PEAR coding standards and that's what my emacs phone is setup for (also you don't have to set up multiple major modes).

Everything else is done in emacs because it is the better editor. Just wish it was pretty.

JasonFruit• 13 years ago

I'm impressed with Sublime Text after trying it out with some dedication — it has a lot to offer, and I'd recommend it over Emacs to someone just starting out, unless they think they might want to learn Lisp. But I think the author was right in saying that Emacs is more serious right now, even though I think Sublime Text will get there.

coolsunglasses• 13 years ago

That's a lot of junk that doesn't have a lot to do with Python.

Take a look here at my dotfiles to see how to use Rope/Ropemode/Ropemacs to get a Python-aware Emacs environment with the goodies that entails:

https://github.com/bitemyapp/dotfiles/

Edit: Try to ignore or not be daunted by the other directories, my Emacs setup is well maintained but very old and has over 400,000 LOC.

flatline• 13 years ago

Yep, Rope in emacs is the way to go. I remember having trouble getting Pymacs set up the first time around, but if you are working on an actual python project (not just some loosely couple source files) I have not found a better environment anywhere.

tikhonj3• 13 years ago

The Emacs tutorial is a great place to start.

Using Emacs is a bit of a paradigm shift in text editing, so you should expect a bit more work up front for great results later on. Going through the tutorial and learning the basic vocabulary and commands takes care of most of that up-front cost and should not take long. I think it took me less than two weeks of fairly casual use.

Part of the beauty is that most of the things in the blog are not limited to Python. All the general text-editing stuff trivially transfers to other languages you may want to learn. And Emacs supports any language you do want to learn to one extent or the other. For some languages, Emacs is even the only option!

So you should consider going through at least the beginning of all this even if you're not interested in Python per se.

Also, check out some of the Emacs Rocks![1] videos. I keep on recommending them because they are awesome. They really show off why Emacs is truly magical.

[1] http://emacsrocks.com/

ninetax• 13 years ago

>> For some languages, Emacs is even the only option

Which ones would those be? Common Lisp using SLIME?

tikhonj3• 13 years ago

I was mostly thinking of Agda[1] and, to a lesser extent, similar languages like Coq[2] with Proof General[3].

You could write Common Lisp in Notepad if you really wanted to. I do not think using Agda would be at all practical without Emacs.

[1] http://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/pmwiki.php

[2] http://coq.inria.fr/

[3] http://proofgeneral.inf.ed.ac.uk/

Ixiaus• 13 years ago

Erlang. Even though some IDE's are starting to support it now. Erlang is the original reason I got into using Emacs actually.

chameco2• 13 years ago

There's decent Common Lisp support in other editors. Lots of people use Vim with Slimv. Clojure is still supported better (especially now that we have tpope's fireplace.vim), but CL is decent to edit.

ra88it• 13 years ago

I was thinking maybe gp was referring to (at least) elisp.

reddit_clone• 13 years ago

Not really a programming mode.

But OrgMode is probably one of the most powerful and unique emacs modes. There is nothing like it anywhere else.

Once you go OrgMode, there is no going back.

No1• 13 years ago

Emacs Lisp

lsiebert2• 13 years ago

Can someone link a vim setup for python, for comparison puposes, perhaps with a short feature comparison? I'm currently a vim user with a fairly basic setup (I tried st 2 but couldn't figure it out for managing my work flow) , but I find the idea of emacs attractive.

tomsthumb3• 13 years ago

Conque shell can 'run a terminal' inside of vim, but it's a bit buggy. It's not really fair to compare vim and emacs, because vim is _just_ a text editor. Vim + screen or vim + tmux (my preference) is much closer to the same ... category of thing that emacs is.

You can split tmux tabs so that you can have vim up in one pane on a 'tab' and python running in another pane in the same 'tab'. Both tmux and screen have decent copy/paste functionality that mimics vim's movement behaviour to some degree. (Tmux also has scriptable sessions, if you like different workflows for different types of projects)

If you want a nice vim setup SPF-13 is a decent place to start. There are tmux configs everywhere. Also Ipython does a lot for you as far as completion, looking at documentation, and the like.

I think that's kind of what you're after, sorry if it's not.

chameco2• 13 years ago

Tmuxinator especially makes doing the vim + tmux thing so much better because it has nice session support (just type "mux <name>" to bring up a session). I've been using it for about six months now, and my current setup can do anything an IDE can in a fraction of a time.

CatMtKing• 13 years ago

You could run emacs with evil[1]. It's got a lot of the familiar keystrokes and modes. I would install it using el-get.

[1] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

JulianWasTaken• 13 years ago

My vimrc is at https://github.com/Julian/dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc but it isn't really divided up into Python specific stuff.

(It's also a bit in flux as I migrate to tpope/vim-dispatch)

I can try elaborating feature-wise when I get home.

srathbun• 13 years ago

I've got a vim setup hosted on github: https://github.com/srathbun/vim-plugins

It has Klen's python-mode plugin as a submodule: https://github.com/klen/python-mode

Python-mode provides awesome sause :) To get the repo, clone it recursively, or you won't have all the submodules. `git clone --recursive https://github.com/srathbun/vim-plugins.git ~/.vim`

parennoob3• 13 years ago

I have a similar emacs setup with cedet, autocomplete, and whatnot, but I have one problem -- things like "evaluate this buffer" don't work when your python environment is on a remote server (due to work constraints I am obliged to do this). Files open fine over tramp, but a lot of things (python-mode, jedi, etc.) don't understand that they are interacting with a remote python shell. Is there any easy way that someone here has found to get around that?

tikhonj3• 13 years ago

If you have a remote file open with Tramp, you can also get a shell open there with M-x shell. Try doing that, running python in that shell and renaming the shell buffer to Python. It might work :P.

If that doesn't work, you might have to find the variable which specifies which buffer has the current running Python process. You should then be able to just change that to a remote shell as above.

You can also automate all of this with a bit of elisp. After you've played around with it a bit, ask around on #emacs--I'm sure there are people there both willing and able to help you out.

parennoob3• 13 years ago

Nice trick to hoodwink emacs :) It didn't work though.

I understand what you're saying in the rest of your comment though -- basically I will have to learn some elisp. Thanks for the help.

cdjk2• 13 years ago

The way I get around that is running emacs on the remote server in screen/tmux. If there's a better way I'd love to know it, but I haven't found it to be too much of a problem.

parennoob3• 13 years ago

I have tried this, and it works fine...almost :) The only problem I have is that doesn't give you some of the GUI goodness. For example, I find CEDET's code folding incredibly useful when I want to get a bird's eye view of my modules, and the CLI version doesn't seem to support drawing the expandoes.

Thanks for the tip though.

xaritas• 13 years ago

Well, you can put emacs into server mode and then connect with emacsclient, provided you tunnel X. I got this working once but I didn't like using the X Windows version emacs over the native desktop version. Sorry I don't remember the details, but I don't recall it being tricky.

My goal was to connect a local emacsclient to a remote emacs server over TCP... if this were possible, I would be fairly ecstatic.

brudgers• 13 years ago

I have found EmacsRedux informative for learning GNUemacs. The key for me was understanding that Emacs is command driven and that shortcuts are merely shortcuts to commands - i.e. M-x <command> invokes the <command> of which emacs has hundreds (+ lisp expressions). Unlike shortcuts, commands can be accessed with auto-complete.

http://emacsredux.com/

julienchastang• 13 years ago

On a related note, emacs support for ipython notebook with ein (http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook/) is marvelous. If you are comfortable with emacs, ein is far superior for interacting with your ipython notebook compared to the browser experience.

jsw97• 13 years ago

Seriously. I spend a large fraction of my day in ein. Great for exploratory data analysis.

agentultra• 13 years ago

iPython Notebook is really cool and the emacs client is extremely well done. I highly recommend checking it out.

http://tkf.github.io/emacs-ipython-notebook/

theanalyst• 13 years ago

I'm happy with using elpy for python development in Emacs. The defaults are nice. Also backends like jedi/rope are supported. https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/elpy

giulivo• 13 years ago

I've attempted something similar but without installing any external package and by documenting the config inline so that one could pick only what needed:

http://giuliofidente.com/2013/04/getting-to-know-and-use-ema...

In there I tried to address also other issues like saving the backup files out of the working dir, show the line numbers, highlight long lines.

Emacs setup for Python development

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