flake8-length VS pycodestyle

PEP8 (pycodestyle): Named after Python’s PEP 8 style guide, this tool checks your Python code against some of the style conventions in PEP 8.

pycodestyle linter (used in Flake8 under the hood by default) already has E501 and W505 rules to validate the line length. flake8-length provides an alternative check that is smarter and more forgiving.

[flake8] max-line-length = 88 ignore = # False positive whitespace before ':' on list slice. # See https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/373 for details E203

Linters analyze code to detect various categories of issues like logistical issue and stylistic issues. Some popular linters are Pylint, pycodestyle, Flake8 and Pylama.

Regarding item 4), sorry to make a relatively minor correction to your very helpful post, but you linked to a four-year-old version of a tool that has received many updates since. Here is the current version (note that the project has been renamed). In addition, it is decidedly not an official tool; making its unofficial status clear was the reason for the name change.

Link. When I write Python I usually have pycodestyle as my linter, and this got me thinking: If I already have a linter configuration for a project, why not just use the linter configuration as my editor configuration as well? The linter configuration is useful to others even if they use a different editor and I don't have to duplicate it in a local vimrc or editorconfig file. I can just use what I already have.

setuptools provides an easy way to do this via entry_points. Here's the relevant part of setup.py in pycodestyle