Change configuration of Python linter and fixer with ALE (nvim plugin)

Question

I use ALE to manage my linting (with flake8) and code formatting (with black). One annoying incompatibility between flake8 and black is that flake8 gives an error when a line has more than 80 characters, while black only corrects lines with more than 88 characters.

So I would like to change flake8's line length to 88 characters, or change black's line length to 80 characters.

Notice that I do not have flake8 installed independently from ALE, but I do have black installed independently from ALE.

Blunge

you probably want to configure flake8 and/or black via their configuration files – Crean

@AnthonySottile The problem is that I do not find flake8's config file where it would normally be since I did not install it outside ALE, and black does not have such config file as far as I understand from the documentation - it only let's you set a custom line length when ran from the command line. – Blunge

I'm the maintainer of flake8, you can configure it with either a .flake8, setup.cfg, or tox.ini file. for black you configure it using pyproject.toml – Crean

@AnthonySottile Thank you, I used pyproject.toml with line-length = 80 and it worked. – Blunge

Answer 1

You can add the below to your .vimrc file:

let g:ale_python_flake8_options = '--max-line-length=88'

Burson

Answer 2

You can just modify the flake8.vim in:

~/.vim/plugged/ale/ale_linters/python/

folder and change line:

call ale#Set('python_flake8_options', '')

into:

call ale#Set('python_flake8_options', '--config=$HOME/.config/flake8')

Then add all config options in this file.

Osteal