Python and vim: Make your own IDE

I prefer to use vim for most of my systems administration and programming related editing tasks. Aside from the usual argument that it will be present on any *nix system worth its silicon that you log in to, I choose it because of the succinct and expressive power of its syntax. While I am still learning new commands and techniques all the time, and while it is true that the learning curve to be anything resembling proficient is rather steep, few editors can boast such a wide range of actions in so few commands.

Right of out the box, however, vim isn’t as suited to editing Python code as it could be. In fact, it’s rather annoying to write Python code with an uncustomized instance of vim. What follows is a description of how to put into place what I see as the most essential features of the editor one chooses to write code, especially Python code, in as manifested with vim. With the following changes, you can create a highly customized and powerful IDE, allowing you to increase your productivity without purchasing a commercial offering.

Before the good stuff, a few requirements. You need to make sure you have vim-full and vim-python installed. Some systems come with vim-minimal, which is lacking in many advanced features. These packages should be in most repositories.

Aside from these package installs, configuration changes described are made in ~/.vimrc. A quick word on the syntax of this file. Double quotation marks denote a line as a comment. I make it a rule to place a comment line before every configuration line or block thereof, so I have some sense later of what the change was for (it’s amazing how fast syntax leaks out of my head when I don’t use it regularly). Regarding Python files, I eventually also began to collect the related customizations into a file “~/.vim/ftplugin/python.vim”. This is loaded whenever Python type files are opened, and allows me to isolate related configurations.
Syntax highlighting

Having code displayed with proper highlighting of the logical components makes reading that code easier to read and understand. Any decent code editor allows for coloring particular to a number of languages, and vim is no exception. To get this working, simply add:

syntax on

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