Document popup size and content

[petrux]

1. the first line of the documentation content (which should be the function's signature) isn't displayed in the popup.
2. the popup should fit better the buffer dimensions

(Emacs 24.3 on Ubuntu 12.04, elpy installed from Marmalade)

[jorgenschaefer]

Good ideas, just tricky to do. The documentation is strictly what Rope (or Jedi) return for the respective method call, so ideally, this would be a fix in upstream in Rope and/or Jedi. Likewise, the popup is done purely by autocomplete, so a fix would need to happen there.

The documentation popup might be doable with http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PosTip but I'm not sure how this integrates with auto-complete.

[petrux]

About the popup dimension and the buffer size, there is a pull request in popup.el about this issue. I tried to bring it up with a comment. For PosTip: thanks for pointing out, I'll take a look.

For the documentation (w.r.t. the screenshot): if you just type in the python code json.dump(None), then put the cursor over 'dump' and type M-x elpy-doc in the _Python Doc_ buffer you can see the correct text.

[jorgenschaefer]

For Rope, the documentation for the completions are from proposal.get_doc() (with proposal being returned by codeassist.code_assist), while C-c C-d gets the documentation from codeassist.get_doc(). I'm not sure why Rope makes a difference there. Maybe proposals have a separate function for the call tip. Hm.

[petrux]

Ok, got it. Note that I'm not very into the emacs/rope/jedi/elpy "internals", so the next questions may sound silly but... please, forgive me. :-) So, the first question is: why is documentation supplied by Rope? Shouldn't be jedi (that I use as the backend) to supply the documentation and the completion suggestions? Could you point me the code where the completion popup is filled (or it's not something elpy dependent) so that I can take a look? Thanks.

[jorgenschaefer]

Well, if you use Jedi, it's supplied by Jedi. Sorry for the confusion, rope's the default usually :-)

For completions, elpy calls the method rpc_get_completions in the backend class, for Jedi that's found in elpy/backends/jedibackend.py. That returns a list of tuples (two-element lists, really), with the first element the completion and the second the documentation. You can look there if you can coerce Jedi to give more information.

[petrux]

No, I was totally wrong!!! Ok, I think I should slow down a little. Question number zero: what kind of Jedi config shall I place in my .emacs file? Because I'm doing some random experiments and it seems that this is messing everything up. Thanks!

[jorgenschaefer]

(setq elpy-rpc-backend "jedi") should be all you need to use jedi. Also, not installing rope should use jedi if it's available.

[petrux]

I made some tests and I came to this conclusion.
In Rope the documentation for completion is the json.load.__doc__, while the documentation shown is what you have in the REPL typing >>>> help(json.load). The issue is that the first doesn't show the method signature, while this is exactly what one may need in selecting a method among the auto-complete suggestion. Can we study a workaround? I think it would be a real improvement.
In Jedi.el the auto-complete tooltip shows only the method signature.

The only issue I couldn't fix is how to have the arguments in bold one by one in the minibuffer while typing a method invocation in elpy while using jedi.el as the backend. Any suggestion? Thanks.

[jorgenschaefer]

You can certainly study a workaround :-)

Highlighting method arguments would likely have to be done in Emacs Lisp, and it's tricky to parse Python from Lisp. If you find a better option, I'd be very interested.

[petrux]

I'll try to study a workaround for the Rope backup and I've already suggested Jedi.el author to change the tooltip content.

About the arguments highlighting: it should come for free with jedi.el, as it supply this utility on its own...

[jorgenschaefer]

Due to lack of activity, I assume this has been resolved or abandoned. Please do not hesitate to open a new issue (or even a pull request) with further information or ideas, though!