All patches and comments are welcome. Please squash your changes to logical
commits before using git-format-patch and git-send-email to
patches@git.madduck.net.
If you'd read over the Git project's submission guidelines and adhered to them,
I'd be especially grateful.
3 [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/ambv/black.svg?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/ambv/black)
8 *Black* is the uncompromising Python code formatter. By using it, you
9 agree to cease control over minutiae of hand-formatting. In return,
10 *Black* gives you speed, determinism, and freedom from `pycodestyle`
11 nagging about formatting. You will save time and mental energy for
12 more important matters.
14 Blackened code looks the same regardless of the project you're reading.
15 Formatting becomes transparent after a while and you can focus on the
18 *Black* makes code review faster by producing the smallest diffs
22 ## NOTE: This is an early pre-release
24 *Black* can already successfully format itself and the standard library.
25 It also sports a decent test suite. However, it is still very new.
26 Things will probably be wonky for a while. This is made explicit by the
27 "Alpha" trove classifier, as well as by the "a" in the version number.
28 What this means for you is that **until the formatter becomes stable,
29 you should expect some formatting to change in the future**.
31 Also, as a temporary safety measure, *Black* will check that the
32 reformatted code still produces a valid AST that is equivalent to the
33 original. This slows it down. If you're feeling confident, use
39 *Black* can be installed by running `pip install black`.
42 black [OPTIONS] [SRC]...
45 -l, --line-length INTEGER Where to wrap around. [default: 88]
46 --check Don't write back the files, just return the
47 status. Return code 0 means nothing changed.
48 Return code 1 means some files were reformatted.
49 Return code 123 means there was an internal
51 --fast / --safe If --fast given, skip temporary sanity checks.
53 --version Show the version and exit.
54 --help Show this message and exit.
58 ## The philosophy behind *Black*
60 *Black* reformats entire files in place. It is not configurable. It
61 doesn't take previous formatting into account. It doesn't reformat
62 blocks that start with `# fmt: off` and end with `# fmt: on`. It also
63 recognizes [YAPF](https://github.com/google/yapf)'s block comments to
64 the same effect, as a courtesy for straddling code.
67 ### How *Black* formats files
69 *Black* ignores previous formatting and applies uniform horizontal
70 and vertical whitespace to your code. The rules for horizontal
71 whitespace are pretty obvious and can be summarized as: do whatever
72 makes `pycodestyle` happy.
74 As for vertical whitespace, *Black* tries to render one full expression
75 or simple statement per line. If this fits the allotted line length,
88 If not, *Black* will look at the contents of the first outer matching
89 brackets and put that in a separate indented line.
92 l = [[n for n in list_bosses()], [n for n in list_employees()]]
96 [n for n in list_bosses()], [n for n in list_employees()]
100 If that still doesn't fit the bill, it will decompose the internal
101 expression further using the same rule, indenting matching brackets
102 every time. If the contents of the matching brackets pair are
103 comma-separated (like an argument list, or a dict literal, and so on)
104 then *Black* will first try to keep them on the same line with the
105 matching brackets. If that doesn't work, it will put all of them in
109 def very_important_function(template: str, *variables, *, file: os.PathLike, debug: bool = False):
110 """Applies `variables` to the `template` and writes to `file`."""
111 with open(file, 'w') as f:
115 def very_important_function(
122 """Applies `variables` to the `template` and writes to `file`."""
123 with open(file, 'w') as f:
127 You might have noticed that closing brackets are always dedented and
128 that a trailing comma is always added. Such formatting produces smaller
129 diffs; when you add or remove an element, it's always just one line.
130 Also, having the closing bracket dedented provides a clear delimiter
131 between two distinct sections of the code that otherwise share the same
132 indentation level (like the arguments list and the docstring in the
135 Unnecessary trailing commas are removed if an expression fits in one
136 line. This makes it 1% more likely that your line won't exceed the
137 allotted line length limit.
139 *Black* avoids spurious vertical whitespace. This is in the spirit of
140 PEP 8 which says that in-function vertical whitespace should only be
141 used sparingly. One exception is control flow statements: *Black* will
142 always emit an extra empty line after ``return``, ``raise``, ``break``,
143 ``continue``, and ``yield``. This is to make changes in control flow
144 more prominent to readers of your code.
146 That's it. The rest of the whitespace formatting rules follow PEP 8 and
147 are designed to keep `pycodestyle` quiet.
152 You probably noticed the peculiar default line length. *Black* defaults
153 to 88 characters per line, which happens to be 10% over 80. This number
154 was found to produce significantly shorter files than sticking with 80
155 (the most popular), or even 79 (used by the standard library). In
156 general, [90-ish seems like the wise choice](https://youtu.be/wf-BqAjZb8M?t=260).
158 If you're paid by the line of code you write, you can pass
159 `--line-length` with a lower number. *Black* will try to respect that.
160 However, sometimes it won't be able to without breaking other rules. In
161 those rare cases, auto-formatted code will exceed your allotted limit.
163 You can also increase it, but remember that people with sight disabilities
164 find it harder to work with line lengths exceeding 100 characters.
165 It also adversely affects side-by-side diff review on typical screen
166 resolutions. Long lines also make it harder to present code neatly
167 in documentation or talk slides.
169 If you're using Flake8, you can bump `max-line-length` to 88 and forget
170 about it. Alternatively, use [Bugbear](https://github.com/PyCQA/flake8-bugbear)'s
171 B950 warning instead of E501 and keep the max line length at 80 which
172 you are probably already using. You'd do it like this:
177 select = C,E,F,W,B,B950
181 You'll find *Black*'s own .flake8 config file is configured like this.
182 If you're curious about the reasoning behind B950, Bugbear's documentation
183 explains it. The tl;dr is "it's like highway speed limits, we won't
184 bother you if you overdo it by a few km/h".
187 ### Editor integration
189 There is currently no integration with any text editors. Vim and
190 Atom/Nuclide integration is planned by the author, others will require
191 external contributions.
193 Patches welcome! ✨ 🍰 ✨
198 **Dusty Phillips**, [writer](https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=dusty+phillips):
200 > Black is opinionated so you don't have to be.
202 **Hynek Schlawack**, [creator of `attrs`](http://www.attrs.org/), core
203 developer of Twisted and CPython:
205 > An auto-formatter that doesn't suck is all I want for Xmas!
207 **Carl Meyer**, [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/) core developer:
209 > At least the name is good.
211 **Kenneth Reitz**, creator of [`requests`](http://python-requests.org/)
212 and [`pipenv`](https://docs.pipenv.org/):
214 > This vastly improves the formatting of our code. Thanks a ton!
225 ## This tool requires Python 3.6.0+ to run
227 But you can reformat Python 2 code with it, too. *Black* is able to parse
228 all of the new syntax supported on Python 3.6 but also *effectively all*
229 the Python 2 syntax at the same time, as long as you're not using print
232 By making the code exclusively Python 3.6+, I'm able to focus on the
233 quality of the formatting and re-use all the nice features of the new
234 releases (check out [pathlib](https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html) or
235 f-strings) instead of wasting cycles on Unicode compatibility, and so on.
245 In terms of inspiration, *Black* is about as configurable as *gofmt* and
246 *rustfmt* are. This is deliberate.
248 Bug reports and fixes are always welcome! However, before you suggest a
249 new feature or configuration knob, ask yourself why you want it. If it
250 enables better integration with some workflow, fixes an inconsistency,
251 speeds things up, and so on - go for it! On the other hand, if your
252 answer is "because I don't like a particular formatting" then you're not
253 ready to embrace *Black* yet. Such changes are unlikely to get accepted.
254 You can still try but prepare to be disappointed.
256 More details can be found in [CONTRIBUTING](CONTRIBUTING.md).
261 ### 18.3a2 (unreleased)
263 * changed positioning of binary operators to occur at beginning of lines
264 instead of at the end, following [a recent change to PEP8](https://github.com/python/peps/commit/c59c4376ad233a62ca4b3a6060c81368bd21e85b)
267 * ignore empty bracket pairs while splitting. This avoids very weirdly
268 looking formattings (#34, #35)
270 * remove a trailing comma if there is a single argument to a call
272 * if top level functions were separated by a comment, don't put four
273 empty lines after the upper function
275 * fixed missing space in numpy-style array indexing (#33)
277 * fixed spurious space after star-based unary expressions (#31)
284 * only put trailing commas in function signatures and calls if it's
285 safe to do so. If the file is Python 3.6+ it's always safe, otherwise
286 only safe if there are no `*args` or `**kwargs` used in the signature
289 * fixed invalid spacing of dots in relative imports (#6, #13)
291 * fixed invalid splitting after comma on unpacked variables in for-loops
294 * fixed spurious space in parenthesized set expressions (#7)
296 * fixed spurious space after opening parentheses and in default
299 * fixed spurious space after unary operators when the operand was
300 a complex expression (#15)
305 * first published version, Happy 🍰 Day 2018!
309 * date-versioned (see: https://calver.org/)
314 Glued together by [Łukasz Langa](mailto:lukasz@langa.pl).