Emacs users: feedback on diffs between python-mode.el and python.el?

[Malte Helmert]

skip at pobox.com wrote:
> If you're an Emacs user who has used both python-mode.el (the python mode
> code distributed with Python and XEmacs) and python.el (the python mode code
> distributed with GNU Emacs), I'd like to get your impressions on how they
> compare and where you feel the bugs lie.  I'm nominally one of the
> python-mode.el maintainers (though not very active) but have never tried the
> GNU python.el.

One of the two modes (if memory serves, python.el) has an annoying
bug/feature where indent-region is essentially implemented as "hit tab
once on every line in the region". Of course, this frequently does the
wrong thing as "tab" has to guess the right indentation in cases where
there are multiple possibilities. So this frequently messes up the
semantics of the code.

This is the main reason why I always use the other mode (if memory
serves, python-mode.el) these days, which keeps the logical structure of
the code intact with indent-region.

I frequently use (setq py-indent-offset 4) + indent-region to reformat
my old code which used 2-space indents, so this is a feature that is
important to me.

Malte