pycodestyle VS pycodestyle.nvim

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

With that said, there is still a use for remote plugins: if you really need a libraries from that ecosystem, and you would have those libraries anyway, then there is no harm done. I have a plugin called pycodestyle.nvim which makes your Pycodestyle linter configuration available in Neovim. That way I can use my linter settings as my editor settings per project, no need to keep separate settings in sync. If I want to use that plugin I need Pycodestyle installed anyway, and if Pycodestyle is not available to plugin stays dormant.

Not really. There is exactly one legitimate use case for writing plugins in something other than Lua or Vim script: if you want to use libraries written in that language. For example, I have a plugin named pycodestyle.nvim which is written in Python because it uses the Pycodestyle library to figure out the user's linter configuration. If I wanted to do it in Lua I would basically have to re-implement a major part of Pycodestyle myself, which would be a pointless waste of time. And people who use that plugin already have Pycodestyle installed anyway, so it's not an extra dependency.

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.