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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,334

Python Development in Emacs questions

I am trying to set up Emacs as a development environment for Python.

So far, I like Python-mode better than the intrinsic Python support.  What I am fighting with is auto completion.  I want to set the system up so that I can get true auto completion; not just a list of methods and variables I have all ready referenced from the class.  I know there are packages out there that do this by analyzing the source, and I know there are other packages that do it by invoking the interpreter.  I don''t care which method is used.  I also realize that introspection complicates things significantly, so I have no expectations (or real need) to deal with introspection.

The Internet is full of ancient information dealing with Python 2, ropemacs, auto-complete.el, methods of hooking in ipython, dealing with python-mode, dealing with python.el, etc... 

Eclipse does a pretty good job of this, but is way to heavy an environment for my taste.  So, I ask, what is the Arch state-of-the-art emacs Python environment?

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lunar

Member

Registered: 2010-10-04

Posts: 95

Re: Python Development in Emacs questions

auto-complete.el based on ropemacs provides completion of Python symbols in Emacs.   You can find a working configuration of this on GitHub (look at site-start.d/60python.el), which completes symbols of all imported packages from the global Interpreter, and of the current module.  Completion of class and instance attributes works to a limited degree, "collections.namedtuple()" (or similar sorts of magic) for instance do not work well.  It does not provide the documentation of completed objects.

This setup is the best I've managed to accomplish, and b and large it certainly  can save typing. But it is very far away from the kind of completion provided by modern IDEs like Eclipse or Visual Studio for Java and C# respectively, and likely also somewhat far away from the Pydev plugin for Eclipse (never used this one, so just guessing).  Particularly, this setup doesn't support the "programming by guessing" kind of style very well, where you guess the semantics and functionality of an object by simply browsing the list of completed symbols.  You'll need to have documentation available any way.

Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

Re: Python Development in Emacs questions

I am trying to set up Emacs as a development environment for Python.

So far, I like Python-mode better than the intrinsic Python support.

I can't make Python-mode work, BTW. I've installed emacs-python-mode and modified my .emacs as suggested:

(autoload 'python-mode "python-mode.el" "Python mode." t)
(setq auto-mode-alist (append '(("/*.\.py$" . python-mode)) auto-mode-alist))

.py files get opened in fundamental mode, while without the addition Python mode is shown, at least.

If you've made any headway, ewaller, keep us posted, please