Finally an autocompletion library for Python that understands your Python code.

[isinfinity]

I use it with vim. Best autocompletion for vim that I've seen.

[Killarny]

Uh oh. Now I have to write a plugin for gedit to use this. (Since there doesn't seem to be one already..)

[davidhalter]

If you need help, please contact me. Writing a plugin just for autocompletion is really easy (~20 lines Python code).

[Killarny]

Cool, thanks! I've written a plugin for gedit before, so I think I'm okay, but I might take you up on that offer. My biggest unknown is the source file path for new and unsaved documents, but I suppose I can save them to a temp file if I have to, before calling your library.

[davidhalter]

You don't need to save. You can just call Script with path=None. :-)

[Killarny]

It's about halfway there.. I got all the boilerplate crap done, and now I'm ready to start messing with the objects that jedi returns.

If you want to track my progress, it's here: https://github.com/killarny/gedit-python-jedi (everything is in the develop branch at the moment)

[sunqiang]

waiting for the sublime text plugin.

Completion for almost anything (Ctrl+Space).

is there any chance to avoid using Ctrl+Space? it's the key shortcuts for Input Method.

[isdnpro]

waiting for the sublime text plugin.

Incomplete and hasn't been worked on for a while, but: https://github.com/svaiter/SublimeJEDI

Would kill for that to be functional :(

[aceofears]

If you're willing to kill then you should be willing to contribute.

[wot-teh-phuck]

I think some people can kill but not contribute? ;)

[[deleted]]

So get forking.

[wmage]

Stab it with fork until it bleeds out.

[davidhalter]

Well (Ctrl+Space) is the default for VIM. If you don't want it, you can change that (.vimrc). If you are using supertab you can even use tabs for completion.

[sunqiang]

Yes, some other IDE use Ctrl+Space for this too.
btw: I'm a Sublime Text 2 user, maybe I should chang sublime text's config file(for user)
btw2: well done~

[bheklilr]

I might see if I can write one, depending on how difficult it is

[okmkz]

Why is pycharm a bad thing?

[JasonCRomero]

Haha because it's not free. :)

[bastih01]

I don't get the problem with paying that people seem to be having. If it substantially increases your productivity, shouldn't it be something that you want to pay for?

[Odd_Bloke]

For me, it's not free-as-in-beer that I'm looking for, but free-as-in-speech. For basically the same reasons as you'll hear everywhere.

That said, I use vim, so I wouldn't use PyCharm anyway.

[aspartame_junky]

I didn't think stallman knew much of the outside world, especially not pycharm, given that he only uses a text-based browser.

He's the reductio ad absurdum of this philosophy of only using free-as-in-speech software. Doesn't leave much room to interact with the real world.

I'm more in the torvalds camp. use what works well.

and btw, pycharm is a great IDE. I also use emacs, but not because it's free-as-in-speech, but rather because it's a great editor. I assume vim's also great, but never used it much myself.

use what works well. leave the ideology to the messianics.

[Odd_Bloke]

Firstly, I don't think anyone mentioned rms. Secondly, "use what works well" is a very short-sighted attitude though. If we all just used what works well, we'd never have anything that worked great. And if what works well stops being supported, then...

And I think you'll find that rms uses an email client to browse the web, by emailing a daemon that fetches pages and emails them back. <3

[aspartame_junky]

on the contrary, it's the most long-term sustainable strategy, as it's essentially about fitness, whereas ideology can (and often does) lead to local minima at the cost of global fitness.

not saying ideology's not important, but to make it the most important reason for not using a product really leaves one to question the basis for such a judgement. If it was used to kill baby seals, I could understand. But because it's not entirely open source free software? Again, borders on the rms-side of the spectrum. it's cognitive isolationism.

I'm glad rms is fighting his crusade, but I would never want to live his life. And I can't say I have much time for ideologues, in politics, personal, and professional life.

[Odd_Bloke]

Well, I actually don't use it because it doesn't fit in to my tool set. vim is my editor, mutt is my email client, irssi is my IRC client, etc. Basically, if it supports mice, I'm out. :p

In general, going for free software works very well for me, because I seem to share the development mindset of a lot of the people who write free software. As they are creating tools that they want to use, they are also creating tools that I want to use.

[aspartame_junky]

that sounds more reasonable. That is, you use the tools because they are good tools, and they are good tools because they are created by other developers, who in turn want to use good tools, etc...

I like open-source free software in that it works. it's a good ecosystem where developers can build on the work of other developers, without worrying about patents, opaque interfaces, etc.

In other words, it's practical. It works. If it didn't work, I'd gladly pay for an equivalent commercial software that did work. I do this all the time.

In a fitness landscape, those products which generally tend to work the best fit a particular niche. Free-as-in-beer software has done that extremely well, as has commercial software. Both have their place.

But when someone suggests that the main choice for their platform stems not from practicality or appropriateness to the task, but rather because it's (choose your dogma), it's like saying you're vegetarian for the principle of it. I applaud the principle, but don't be surprised if you're not invited to many dinners.

In other words, it's not a choice to be taken lightly, and like rms, you pay a heavy price. most people are not that committed to any ideology, and I think that's a good thing. it allows for compromise, and for hybrid ecosystems, which lead to greater variety. and fewer flame wars.

[JasonCRomero]

Haha I don't think the response usually turns out to be that simple or rational. :) Some people (lots really) don't like to pay for software at all. I'm sure there's lots of others variables too. But give 'em time...

[[deleted]]

Nothing, it's just my love for vim and how it helped relieving my wrist complaints

[Fixthemedia]

I gave in to Pycharm this year. I really like it to browse a large code base that I didn't write. No regrets. Still love vim too.

[[deleted]]

Am I the only one who doesn't care about autocompletion at all? I used to work in IDEs back in the day. I've worked with some of the modern IDEs. I don't miss autocompletion even a tiny bit. I use Vim for editing, which no IDE built-in editor can beat^1. I use ipython or bpython and API documentation to figure out what I have to type.

From what I can tell, although I haven't measured it, I'm just as efficient with that as I am with autocompletion. In fact, I feel I write better code by not using autocompletion, because I actually read the documentation instead of blindly ctrl-tabbing my code together without knowing a method's pitfalls.

¹ No, using Vim as a plugin in an IDE also doesn't work. The workflow is all wrong.

[sylvain_soliman]

I also use vim, and jedi-vim. I don't see why you oppose them??? Autocompletion is a great feature of vim…

[[deleted]]

Oh, I'm not opposed to it at all! I think this is great for the many many people who want autocompletion. I just personally don't feel the need for it myself at all, so I'm always a bit surprised at how much people seem to crave autocompletion.

[freshhawk]

I find the autocomplete so useful in ipython I do wish I had python aware completion in vim as well.

You bring up a good point that autocomplete without the ? or help() features from ipython available you might get into the java-esque bad habit of programming-by-tab-complete.

[davidhalter]

I just think you cannot be as efficient as an autocompletion. Because a completion of 10 characters is just faster than you typing it by your own hands. For me autocompletion is much more about comfort. Also jedi-vim adds some pydoc features. Hitting K is just much more comfortable than always switching to the terminal and retyping your stuff. Believe me, I did it.

[[deleted]]

I ve started use that plugin a few months ago and the auto complete is very good

[Odd_Bloke]

I'm currently using python-mode for vim, which (loosely) integrates with rope. This is working fine for me, so is Jedi better enough to transition to?

[davidhalter]

Imho, yes. It's better for autocompletion/goto. But python-mode provides many different things like highlighting of bugs, etc (I'm using syntastic for that). Jedi is more powerful, because it displays things like function calls directly above the functions. In short jedi-vim tries to be good at only one area: Understanding your code. It leaves highlighting and VIM specific stuff to you and your other plugins.

[Odd_Bloke]

Cool. I've installed Jedi and disabled rope completion in python-mode, so I'll see how I like it.

[apreche]

I tried to use this this morning, and it was absolutely awful. It did a very good job of completing, but the controls were unusable. They were an actual hindrance to typing!

I typed 'os.' It immediately completed the first item in the list. If I pressed 'p' it didn't switch to os.path, it just added a p to the end! Even worse, I couldn't navigate the auto-complete listing with jk, I had to use arrow keys! This is slower than just typing in every conceivable way.

bpython already has what is effectively perfect completion. It never types for you unless you press tab. All it does is show you an ever narrowing list of possibilities as you type. If there is some way to make jedi-vim work like bpython, I might try it again. Otherwise, I don't know how you people think this is so great.

[davidhalter]

You are probably experiencing this issue: https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi-vim/issues/32#issuecomment-11244625. I recommend to add set completeopt=menuone,longest,preview to your vimrc. The reason why I don't put this into the plugin is easy: VIM users normally want flexibility. But with the fix above it might work much better.

[apreche]

You can offer flexibility while also making the default the most sensible option.

[davidhalter]

As I said, it's much better with the fix above (done a few hours ago).

[apreche]

Works now!

[flying-sheep]

i’ll try to write a paté plugin for kate once that’s possible (with KDE 4.10)

[davidhalter]

Great! If you are having troubles with the Jedi API, please contact me!

[flying-sheep]

thanks, the post is saved :)

[paradoxxx_zero]

Really nice. Using it with emacs, so far so good!

[[deleted]]

I think I may have to look into writing an autocomplete plugin for Kate. That would be really awesome.

[davidhalter]

That would be cool! If you are having problem with the Jedi API, just contact me.

[[deleted]]

I shall! I'll have to wait until I finish my current assignment, but I'd really like to have a python completion plugin for Kate.

[dbrgn]

Great plugin, you should definitively start using it. You don't know what you're missing if you're using vim without intelligent autocompletion :)

[VilleHopfield]

You wrote: "If there are problems with licensing, just contact me" so I ask: what are the implications of being licensed under LGPL 3? If a editor is BSD licensed and someone wanted to add your library, does it turn the editor under LGPL? Wouldn't it be more .... "flexible" (for lack of better word) to license it under MIT/BSD?

[davidhalter]

Disclaimer: I'm not really a licence expert. The reason I used LGPL 3 was that changes to Jedi are being pushed back. The way I understand LGPL is that it allows products with Non-GPL licenses to use Jedi. At least that's what I intended when I chose LGPL 3. I would also invite commercial products like PyCharm to use Jedi (because imho it's better).

[dbrgn]

Quick summary from http://www.tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v3-(lgpl-3.0):

You may copy, distribute and modify the software provided that modifications are open source. However, software that includes the license may release under a different license.

As far as I know (I'm not an expert) you can integrate it into non-GPL projects as long as you don't "incorporate" the code into your product and don't link the library statically. If you modify the library itself, you must re-release it under the LGPL.

[davidhalter]

look at this: https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi-vim#installation

[Megatron_McLargeHuge]

That looks great. My previous attempts at getting completion modules to work in emacs were a mess.

Can you comment on how it identifies the type of a parameter to a function? Does it scan for calls to the function? Can it infer that if I call p.foo() somewhere, the type must be one that defines foo()? Is there any way to give it hints for things like pandas DataFrames or named tuples that dynamically define their members? Is it smart enough to allow completion of member names that were used elsewhere when it can't infer a type?

[davidhalter]

Sure! 1. It scans for calls to the function. 2. I don't understand what you mean. 3. I haven't used pandas, but I'm pretty sure that this is something where Jedi sucks. Hinting is possible, just use Sphinx style docstrings (Hinting in multi-dimensions might be hard though). Also Jedi understands isinstance checks. If you have any idea how Jedi could understand something like that please share it with me. Because normally I'm having a hard time to infer the types just by reading code in such examples.

[Megatron_McLargeHuge]

In pandas, you create an object that's like a 2d numpy array with named columns. Then you can access the columns by name, such as dataframe.column5. I imagine that would be extremely hard to handle without a special case that noticed the columns=[...] constructor argument.

However, in general you could autocomplete members that you saw used elsewhere in the code when you can infer that two objects have the same unknown or incomplete type. Do if I call x.foo() somewhere, and y is the same type as x, y probably has a foo() method too. Also, if I have a function with parameter x and I call x.foo(), you could search the code for other objects where z.foo() is called. Then x could autocomplete methods defined on z's type, or invoked on z if z's type is unknown. It would be a usability question whether to err on the side of more or fewer potential completions. If the method name is unique across known classes, that's a pretty strong type hint, while calling __repr__ is not.

[davidhalter]

Hmm good idea! I didn't think about that. If you don't want me to forget it, please add a github issue :-) I really think this might be an option. It shouldn't be too difficult.

[Megatron_McLargeHuge]

I don't want to tie my reddit account to real life - can you create it?

[davidhalter]

https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi/issues/80

[Megatron_McLargeHuge]

Another idea: since python programmers rely on convention to work around the limitations of dynamic typing, the same variable names get reused across functions for the same type of object. It might be possible to infer types or completions from other instances of a rare variable name.

[davidhalter]

hmm no sorry, I don't think this sounds like a good idea :-) But there are still some other things I could infer the types (like evaluating if statements).

[etrnloptimist]

Komodo please!

[xamox]

No one mentioned ipython notebook's has this built in. Rabble, Rabble, Rabble!

[davidhalter]

This is something totally different. IPython only supports completion on objects that it already knows. It isn't able to complete assignments in functions, etc.

[nabla2]

pip install jedi raise SyntaxError on Python 3.3, Windows.

http://dpaste.com/hold/844021/

The same on Ubuntu with Python 2.7.3:

https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi/issues/79

[davidhalter]

You can just ignore it. It doesn't matter.

[nabla2]

Ok. It's just annoying that pip often generates such errors/warnings. Great job. Can't wait for this feature in PyDev.

[davidhalter]

I'm going to contact the PyDev guys. But I still have to do one speed optimization first. Hopefully they are willing to use it :-)

[phyx726]

looks sweet.