External Code Quality Checkers

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Errors and warnings found by external checkers like ruff, flake8, mypy``, pep8 and pylint may be interleaved with those found by Wing. Wing will filter the warnings through its list of rules to disable warnings. This can be used to quickly disable unwanted warnings, for example those that are stylistic in nature and not real problems in code.

To enable any external checker, check the Enable External Checkers option at the bottom of the Configuration: Defaults page in the Code Warnings tool. Then press the Configure button to select which checkers to enable and when to run them. External checkers may be run when a file is opened, after it is saved to disk, or both. Checkers will also be re-run if warnings are updated manually from the code warnings menu in the editor or the Options menu in the Code Warnings tool.

The command line used to run the checker is configured under its tab in the Configure dialog. By default, Wing runs the Python Executable configured in Project Properties with the -m argument to load the checker. This means that the checker must be installed into the selected Python, usually with pip or conda if using Anaconda Python.

Note that some checkers take a long time to run on even moderately sized source files and may consume significant amounts of CPU time. To prevent checks from consuming too many resources, Wing will skip checks on any file above the threshold set in the Maximum File Size option in the external checker's configuration. When a file is skipped, a message will appear briefly in the status area at the bottom of the IDE window and in the Code Warnings tool.

Once external checkers have been configured, Wing runs them, parses the output, and merges its warnings into the Code Warnings tool and the editor's code warnings indicators. To view the raw output of the checkers that Wing is running, select External Checker Console from the Options menu in the Code Warnings tool.

Flake8 Configuration

The configuration page for flake8 includes two additional options:

  • Use Detected Indent Size causes Wing to pass the indentation size it has detected for the file being checked to flake8 using its --indent-size command line option. For files that do not yet contain any indentation, the Editor > Indentation > Default Indent Size preference is used instead. When this is disabled, flake8's default of 4 is used instead. Default=disabled.
  • Use Configured Line Length tells Wing to pass the line length configured with the Editor > Line Wrapping > Reformatting Wrap Column to flake8 using its --max-line-length command line option. When this is disabled, flake8's default line length is used instead. Default=enabled.

Pylint Configuration

The configuration page for pylint includes three additional options for enabling or disabling warnings based on the priority assigned by Pylint (errors, warnings, and informational messages) to make it easy to enable or disable all warnings of a particular priority. These options work if the default pylint output format is used or if {msg_id} is somewhere in the output format specified with --output-format; if {msg_id} is not in the output format, all warnings will be classified as informational.