Setting up Vim for Python

I really like the Emacs editor for Python because of its smart tabbing for instance if I have something like this

def foo():
    if bar:
         blah
         [b]eep

and I press tab on the cursor (which is on the b of beep), it will not insert a new tab causing a syntax error but it would toggle through the possible levels that beep can be on. Is there any way of getting this effect on Vim?

In general, vim is a very powerful regular language editor (macros extend this but we'll ignore that for now). This is because vim's a thin layer on top of ed, and ed isn't much more than a line editor that speaks regex. Emacs has the advantage of being built on top of ELisp; lending it the ability to easily parse complex grammars and perform indentation tricks like the one you shared above.

To be honest, I've never been able to dive into the depths of emacs because it is simply delightful meditating within my vim cave. With that said, let's jump in.

Getting Started

Janus

For beginners, I highly recommend installing the readymade Janus plugin (fwiw, the name hails from a Star Trek episode featuring Janus Vim). If you want a quick shortcut to a vim IDE it's your best bang for your buck.

I've never used it much, but I've seen others use it happily and my current setup is borrowed heavily from an old Janus build.

Vim Pathogen

Otherwise, do some exploring on your own! I'd highly recommend installing vim pathogen if you want to see the universe of vim plugins.

It's a package manager of sorts. Once you install it, you can git clone packages to your ~/.vim/bundle directory and they're auto-installed. No more plugin installation, maintenance, or uninstall headaches!

You can run the following script from the GitHub page to install pathogen:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload ~/.vim/bundle; \
curl -so ~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim \
    https://raw.github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen/HEAD/autoload/pathogen.vim

Helpful Links

Here are some links on extending vim I've found and enjoyed:

• Turning Vim Into A Modern Python IDE
• Vim As Python IDE
• OS X And Python (osx specific)
• Learn Vimscript The Hard Way (great book if you want to learn vimscript)

For those arriving around summer 2013, I believe some of this thread is outdated.

I followed this howto which recommends Vundle over Pathogen. After one days use I found installing plugins trivial.

The klen/python-mode plugin deserves special mention. It provides pyflakes and pylint amongst other features.

I have just started using Valloric/YouCompleteMe and I love it. It has C-lang auto-complete and python also works great thanks to jedi integration. It may well replace jedi-vim as per this discussion /davidhalter/jedi-vim/issues/119

Finally browsing the /carlhuda/janus plugins supplied is a good guide to useful scripts you might not know you are looking for such as NerdTree, vim-fugitive, syntastic, powerline, ack.vim, snipmate...

All the above '{}/{}' are found on github you can find them easily with Google.

Put the following in your .vimrc

autocmd BufRead *.py set smartindent cinwords=if,elif,else,for,while,try,except,finally,def,class
autocmd BufRead *.py set nocindent
autocmd BufWritePre *.py normal m`:%s/\s\+$//e ``
filetype plugin indent on

See also the detailed instructions

I personally use JetBrain's PyCharm with the IdeaVIM plugin when doing anything complex, for simple editing the additions to .vimrc seem sufficient.

There is a bundled collection of Vim plugins for Python development: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3770

Under Linux, What worked for me was John Anderson's (sontek) guide, which you can find at this link. However, I cheated and just used his easy configuration setup from his Git repostiory:

git clone -b vim https://github.com/sontek/dotfiles.git

cd dotfiles

./install.sh vim

His configuration is fairly up to date as of today.

Re: the dead "Turning Vim Into A Modern Python IDE" link, back in 2013 I saved a copy, that I converted to a HTML page as well as a PDF copy:

http://persagen.com/files/misc/Turning_vim_into_a_modern_Python_IDE.html

http://persagen.com/files/misc/Turning_vim_into_a_modern_Python_IDE.pdf

Edit (Sep 08, 2017) updated URLs.

Some time ago I installed Valloric/YouCompleteMe and I find it really awesome. It provides you completion for file paths, function names, methods, variable names... Together with davidhalter/jedi-vim it makes vim great for python programming (the only thing missing now is a linter).

A very good plugin management system to use. The included vimrc file is good enough for python programming and can be easily configured to your needs. See http://spf13.com/project/spf13-vim/