[TxMt] some suggestions for the Python bundle

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Thu Nov 9 03:29:21 UTC 2006


I recently did a post to my programming blog discussing my 30 day experience
with TextMate (http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2006/11/my-month-with-textmate.html )
where I said I liked the app but there just was not quite enough to tear me
away from Vim at the moment (but who knows since I just started using Vim
again and I am already missing the pretty GUI of TextMate  =).

I had some personal gripes about the Python bundle in the post and Jacob Rus
suggested that I email the list with those issues so that they could
possibly be addressed by someone with bundle commit privileges.

I think the biggest universal issue I have is the lack of docsting support
in the various snippets.  Both the function and method snippets leave out
docstring tab stops which is really unfortunate as Python best practices
practically dictate a docstring for *every* function or method (see
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ for the official style guide for
Python).  The class definition does have a docstring, but following
docstring conventions from PEP 257 (
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0257/) which is referenced by PEP 8 there
should be a blank line between the class definition line and the docstring
for the class but that would mess up the code folding so I can look past
that.

But that leads to the problem of code folding not working with Python when
there any blank lines within a block.  Jacob said that this should be
addressed in TM 2 by making it easier to define whitespace-delimited
grammars which is great to hear.

The last big issue is the assumption that files containing unit tests end in
'Test.py'.  In Python's unit test suite all files use the *prefix* of
'test_' to signify something is a test.   This has the nice perk of not
requiring all test files to end in '.py' since you can directly execute
files with other extensions.

Anyway those were my biggest issues.  I know most of these are minimal since
editing them directly myself is simple enough, but it would be nice if they
were part of the default bundle so I can get any other improvements made to
the svn repository for those things instead of having them ignored because I
have a local edit.

Keep up the good work.  As I said, I think TextMate is a good app, just not
exactly for me (at the moment).

-Brett
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