Develop Reference

Why is the word file get highlighted in .py files in the Vim text editor?

The word "file" in python is not a keyword, but my Vim highlights it as if it were. Can someone suggest a fix and explain this strange behaviour? It keeps messing with me. It bothers me every time I look at it.
Extra info
I think I use regular Vim—I haven't tinkered with my .vimrc much, certainly not with the syntax highlighting.

Many builtins were removed in the Python 2 to 3 transition. file is one of them. Lots of syntax highlighters still highlight them. Now that Python 2 is no longer supported, maintainers may be willing to remove them from the lists, so you can try opening an issue if it bothers you.

textmate >> vim for python - teething troubles: especially indenting

I'm (attempting) to move from textmate to vim [macvim to be exact] as my primary editor. I have already installed snipmate - wondering if there are other plugins you would suggest I install?
In particular I seem to be having a lot of trouble with indenting (<< seems to really do some very strange/unpredictable things), and I can't seem to find a solution for this - are there plugins I need for this to work properly?
Thanks!

For source code,
:h =
In a nutshell, in normal mode inside a block you wish to work with:
=a{ to re-indent a block. =a} and =aB work as well.
=2a{ to re-indent this block and its outer block.
If you happen to stand on a brace then =% will re-indent up to the matching brace.
>a{ to increase the indent of this block.
<a{ to decrease the indent of this block.
. repeats the last command, so <a{. decreases the indent of this block twice.
Make sure you have filetype set so Vim recognizes the filetype. Indenting is a function of the file type, after all.
For text,
:h gq
gq{ will format this paragraph.
gq( will format this sentence.
gqgq will format this line.
gggqG will format the entire document.

Set the filetype setting in your vimrc file
filetype plugin indent on
That should enable filetype plugins and automatic indentation

I am not sure what you need exactly as I have not used textmate. But I do use these Plugins for VIM. They have helped me a lot.

Which is the closest Python equivalent to Perl::Tidy?

Coming from Perl I've been used to hitting C-c t to reformat my code according to pre-defined Perl::Tidy rules. Now, with Python I'm astonished to learn that there is nothing that even remotely resembles the power of Perl::Tidy. PythonTidy 1.20 looks almost appropriate, but barfed at first mis-aligned line ("unexpected indent").
In particular, I'm looking for the following:
Put PEP-8 into use as far as possible (the following items are essentially derivations of this one)
Convert indentation tabs to spaces
Remove trailing spaces
Break up code according to the predefined line-length as far as it goes (Eclipse-style string splitting and splitting method chains)
Normalize whitespace around
(bonus feature, optional) Re-format code including indentation.
Right now, I'm going throught someone else's code and correct everything pep8 and pyflakes tell me, which is mostly "remove trailing space" and "insert additional blank line". While I know that re-indentation is not trivial in Python (even though it should be possible just by going through the code and remembering the indentation), other features seem easy enough that I can't believe nobody has implemented this before.
Any recommendations?
Update: I'm going to take a deeper look at PythonTidy, since it seems to go into the right direction. Maybe I can find out why it barfs at me.

There is a reindent.py script distributed with python in the scripts directory.

untabify.py (Tools/scripts/untabify.py from the root directory of a Python source distribution) should fix the tabs, which may be what's stopping Python Tidy from doing the rest of the work.

Have you tried creating a wrapper around pythontidy? There's one for the sublime editor here.
Also, does pythontidy break up long lines properly for you? When I have a long line that ends in a tuple, it creates a new line for every entry in the tuple, instead of using Python's implied line continuation inside parentheses, brackets and braces as suggested by PEP-8.

I have used autopep8 for this purpose and found it handy.

Enforce "spaces" or "tabs" only in python files?

In Python, is there a mean to enforce the use of spaces or tabs indentation with a per file basis ?
Well, perhaps "enforce" is too strong, more like a "recommendation".
I keep receiving patch files with mixed indentation and this is annoying... (to say the least) Python itself can tell when there is a problem, but I am searching something to do that at the editor level, like it exists for the charset.
Edit : Ok, my question wasn't clear, I am asking this because I keep receiving corrections and patches in any mix of tab/space you can imagine. I am using Mercurial as a DVCS, perhaps something exists at this level ?

Tim Peters has written a nifty script called reindent.py which converts .py files to use 4-space indents and no tabs. It is available here, but check your distribution first -- it may have come bundled in an Examples or Tools directory. (On the latest LTS Ubuntu, it is provided by the python2.7-examples package.)
If you can set up a Mercurial hook you should be able to run all files through reindent.py.
By the way, if you are using unix, then your system may also have the expand (and unexpand) command, which convert all tabs to spaces (and spaces to tabs). However, in this case, I think reindent.py is the right tool.

Look at the tabnanny module: — Detection of ambiguous indentation.

This is something your editor should do for you. Most editors (try Notepad++ for example, it's free) will let you set whether hitting tab enters a tab character or a number of spaces. I'd recommend using two spaces instead of tab in all files (I find 4 is too much). Using spaces instead of tabs is better as it means that you can indent stuff using both the space & tab keys without worrying about messing up your files.
If you have files that have a mix it isn't hard to write your own script to convert tabs to spaces

As explicited in PEP 8, never mix tabs and space. However, a file with both may just run...
As it says there:
The most popular way of indenting Python is with spaces only. The
second-most popular way is with tabs only. Code indented with a mixture
of tabs and spaces should be converted to using spaces exclusively.
When invoking the Python command line interpreter with the -t option, it issues
warnings about code that illegally mixes tabs and spaces. When using -tt
these warnings become errors. These options are highly recommended!
the solution is therefore to use as a default:
python -t my_mixed_code.py
To answer at the editor level, this depends on the editor, please specify!

Getting proper code completion for Python on Vim?

I've gotten omnicompletion with Pysmell to work before, but I can't seem to do it again.
I tried following some steps online, but most, if not all, of them are to vague and assume too much that you know what you are doing to some extent.
Can someone post a full, step-by-step tutorial on how to get code completion working properly, for complete Vim newbies (for dummies?)?

There's also Ctrl+n in insert mode which will autocomplete based on the words it has seen in any of the open buffers (even in other tabs).

You may try Pydiction (Excerpt below)
Description Pydiction allows you to
Tab-complete Python code in Vim,
including: standard, custom and
third-party modules and packages. Plus
keywords, built-ins, and string
literals.

Pyflakes has a vim plugin that does this pretty awesomely. Unlike Pydiction, you don't need to build a dictionary beforehand (so if you're bouncing between different virtualenvs it's a bit less hassle.) I haven't been using it long but it seems very slick.

Try hitting Ctrl-p while typing mid-word. Ctrl-p inserts the most recent word that starts with the prefix you're typing and Ctrl-n inserts the next match. If you have several possibilities, you can hit ctrl-p more than once to substitute each candidate in order.