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by forlorn_mammoth 42 days ago
It's 2026. I'm using Jupyter notebooks in Databricks. Guess what my tooling (including my "text editor", the Jupyter notebook), does not do?

Yes, I can castle-[ to shift a block of code left or right, but this is not always problem-free nor is it automatic nor does it have any sense of where the indents should go.

Yes, there is a "format python properly" button which often errors out says "there is an indentation error in your python so I cannot automatically indent it"

Would I like to use better tooling? I present my .vim file as evidence. Am I using what they tell me is state of the art? yes. And in 2026, state of the art does not solve python indenting, because python indenting is inherently a broken paradigm

2 comments

> Would I like to use better tooling? I present my .vim file as evidence. Am I using what they tell me is state of the art? yes. And in 2026, state of the art does not solve python indenting, because python indenting is inherently a broken paradigm

I don't know what to tell you. I use Vim and find it trivial to get the indentation right using my distro's stock config.

Does your tooling not allow you to select multiple lines of code and press Tab or Shift-Tab to indent/dedent the entire block?

It usually only takes me a 1-5 seconds to fix the indentation when I copy/paste code that existed at a different indentation level. This is not something I'd complain about, personally.