Sunday, August 14, 2011

Emacs, Tramp and Python auto-completion

At work, I use Aqauamcs Emacs on my OS X laptop for editing code that runs on FreeBSD and Linux servers in our colo. Since the files are remote (as is the environment for running them), I use TRAMP to let me conveniently edit these files from my laptop. Before TRAMP, I used sshfs to achieve the same goal, but I ran into issues where files would get corrupted, and I haven't tried it since.

I have a few useful customizations for Python editing: flymake and Pyflakes support to flag the more egregious errors, and highlight-80+-mode to show me when my lines get too long. But it still leaves quite a bit to be desired.

About once a year, I get all ambitious and try to get auto-completion working for Python code in Emacs. This generally results in me searching the internet endlessly, installing a number of packages that ultimately don't work, contemplating fixing some of them until I realize I don't know Emacs Lisp, and then promising myself I'll learn it. (I never do.) This generally results in at least 2 days of wasted effort, and I still don't have auto-completion.

It seems that pretty much everyone out there uses Pymacs and pycomplete or ropemacs to do this, but unfortunately Pymacs only runs on the local host. (I've patched it to get it to run on a remote host, but it's not a great solution as it can only run on one machine.) All these tools get confused by TRAMP filenames, so all in all its a pretty ugly situation.

This year, I made a little bit of progress. I found auto-complete mode. By default, it doesn't give you anything fancy for Python editing, but it will automatically complete other words you've used in the same buffer. As it turns out that's most of them, making this is a great 90% solution. It'd be nice to get completion that's a little more semantically-aware, but that's not so easy.

I also installed yasnippet, which is a pretty powerful tool that can save you some typing and integrates somewhat with auto-complete. Getting auto-complete and yasnippet to play nicely together was a bit tricky; I ended up having to change yasnippet's key bindings to conflict less with auto-complete.(Otherwise, the behavior I'd get depended on whether I waited long enough for auto-complete's completion window to pop up. Yikes!)

All in all, I'd say I've still got some work to do to make my Emacs setup as efficient as I'd like, but this week's efforts have definitely helped quite a bit!

2 comments:

  1. Ah, yes. I stumbled here when searching for a way to do Python auto-completion over tramp. I go through the same phases as you do. There is an alternative completion library, called Supplement: http://packages.python.org/supplement/ , which is used by another editor (Snaked). It seems to be nicer than Rope, with no configuration necessary. I hold some hope that I or someone else will integrate it with Emacs. And that it will work with Tramp, as long as you have a supplement-server running on the remote host.

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  2. Daivd: I'll have to check that out! Thanks!
    (Sorry for the delay in comment moderation... I always figured I'd get an email when somebody posts a comment. Looks like I only get the notification email after I approve the comment for posting.)

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