Formatting with Ruff

The Problem

• John: I prefer to have tabs instead of spaces.
• Jane: No, it’s wrong. Spaces are better!
• John: But c’mon, with tabs, the code looks cleaner!
• Jane: No, it doesn’t! Spaces are more consistent in different environments!

Sounds familiar?

Important

Coding style should never be a topic of discussion.

It should be enforced. Having a consistent style across the codebase makes it easier to read and understand.

The Solution

ruff, ruff is the solution. For many years, the Python community has been using black for this purpose. However, recently ruff format has overtaken black in terms of speed and is gaining more and more adoption.

Example: You write code like:

def divide(
        a,b         
):
    return a/b
    
def multiply(a
    ,b
             ):
        return a*b

but it’s nightmarish to read. ruff format will take care of it and make it look like:

def divide(a, b):
    return a / b

def multiply(a, b):
    return a * b

by removing unnecessary spaces, aligning arguments, and adding missing spaces.

But what’s even more important you define one ruff.toml file in the root of your project and everyone in the team will use the same style. No more discussions.

Using and configuring ruff

For ruff configuration, refer to the official formatter documentation.

To run ruff on your project, just run:

ruff format

Why not black?

ruff offers the same functionality as black but is faster and easier to configure, it has also linting capabilities.