Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Luyt | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

Luyt

make sure you use tabs to format all of your Python code

I disagree. Idiomatic Python uses 4 spaces per indent.

Either solely use tabs or solely use spaces, they don’t work well together, at least in my experience

Mixing tabs and spaces is indeed very unwise. You can run Python with the -tt option to make sure you're consistent.

Read Style Guide for Python Code for more advice on this front

I agree ;-) The author probably refers to PEP8, http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

View on HN

Could not agree more!!!! If you're a vimmy, be sure to add this friendly helper into your .vimrc

:set tabstop=4

:set shiftwidth=4

:set expandtab

Or, if you only want to use these settings for python files, create a ~/.vim/ftplugin/python.vim file. Mine looks like this:

  setlocal tabstop=4
  setlocal softtabstop=4
  setlocal shiftwidth=4
  setlocal textwidth=80
  setlocal smarttab
  setlocal expandtab
  setlocal smartindent

Today I learned...

Thanks.

It looks like ftplugin is a native vim extension - is that correct?

I'm a bit late in responding, but yes, it's a native vim extension. To make sure your plugins are loaded automatically, put

  filetype plugin on

in your .vimrc.

I was fixing a makefile the other day with a coworker and it ended up being an indentation issue. And then we asked out loud why anyone would repeat this hell again...

Now, I am not a python programmer, but I am interested to learn more about how the structure via indentation how worked out for the language.

Ah yes, I'll read more into it! thanks :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com