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Comment by BenGosub | Hacker News Reader

Black has been clearly unable to catch up Prettier for years. We still don't have format selection and often times formating doesn't work for different reasons. On the other hand I love how consistent Prettier is, I hope for a similar experience, will definitely give Ruff a try.

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> We still don't have format selection

And you never will. From https://github.com/psf/black:

Black is the uncompromising Python code formatter. By using it, you agree to cede control over minutiae of hand-formatting. In return, Black gives you speed, determinism, and freedom from pycodestyle nagging about formatting. You will save time and mental energy for more important matters.

Unless your back-and-forth flew over my head, GP is referring to being able to format a range of lines in a file (i.e. a selection), they're not talking about selecting a formatting style.

You are right, I probably misunderstood. But now I am curious, what is the use case for formatting just a range of lines and not the entire file?

Maybe formatting just the lines you've modified: on Emacs I'm a big fan of dtrt-indent, which fixes the indentation only on the lines you've modified, without breaking the style of the rest of the file. Great when collaborating on an open-source project. The default "format-on-save" setting would reformat the entire file, creating huge diffs for simple changes.

It's very handy for when you copy something in the editor and the file is not saved, you probably don't intend to save it, but you want to format the code, because it will be more readable.

>Black has been clearly unable to catch up Prettier for years.

Does prettier work on python code?

Not yet, it's on their roadmap for years

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