An irritating little bug in the latest GNU Emacs Python autoindent code

July 3, 2016

I really like having smart autoindent in my editor when writing code, Python code included. When it works, autoindent does exactly what I would do by hand, does it easier, and in the process shows me errors in my code (if the autoindent is 'wrong', it is a signal that something earlier is off). But the flipside of this is that when autoindent goes wrong it can be a screaming irritation, as I flip from working with my editor to actively fighting it.

Unfortunately the latest official version of GNU Emacs has such an issue in its Python autoindent code, under conditions that are probably rare. To see the bug, set Emacs up with python-indent-offset set to 8 and indent-tabs-mode set to t, and then enter:

def abc():
	if d in e:
		pass
	# Hit return here:

If you put your cursor on the end of the comment and hit return, autoindent doesn't add any indentation at all. It should add one level of indentation. Also, once you have this code in a .py file you don't need to set anything in Emacs; Emacs will auto-guess that the indent offset is 8 and then the mere presence of tabs will cause things to explode. This makes this issue especially annoying and/or hazardous.

Some people will say that this serves me right for still using tabs for indentation in my Python code. I'm aware that there's been a general movement in the Python community to indent all Python code with only spaces, regardless of how much you indent it by, but for various reasons I have strongly resisted this. One of them is that I edit Python code in multiple editors, not all of them ones with smart autoindentation, and space-based indenting is painful in an editor that doesn't do it for you. Well, at least using generous indents with manual spaces is painful, and I'm not likely to give that up any time soon.

(I like generous indents in code. Small indent levels make everything feel crammed together and it's less obvious if something is misindented when everything is closer. Of course Python's many levels of nesting doesn't necessarily make this easy; by the time I'm writing an inner function in a method in a class, I'm starting to run out of horizontal space.)

PS: I suspect that I'm going to have to give up my 'indent with tabs' habits some day, probably along with my 8-space indents. The modern Python standard seems to be 4-space indent with spaces and there's a certain amount to be said for the value of uniformity.

(People are apparently working on Python equivalents of Go's gofmt, eg yapf. This doesn't entirely make my issues go away, but at least it would give me some tools to more or less automatically convert existing code over so that I don't have to deal with a mismash of old and new formatting in different files or projects.)

Written on 03 July 2016.
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Last modified: Sun Jul 3 23:02:17 2016
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