clawde

Move inline imports — imports buried inside function bodies — back to the top of the file, where they belong.

Imports inside try/except blocks, inside if TYPE_CHECKING: blocks, or marked with # noqa are left in place.

Install / run

Run without installing:

uvx clawde --help

Or install it:

uv tool install clawde
# or
pipx install clawde

Usage

By default, clawde runs in dry-run mode and prints a table of imports it would move. Pass --write to actually apply the changes.

# Show what would change in the current directory
clawde

# Apply changes
clawde --write

# Target specific paths
clawde src/ scripts/foo.py

Example output

❯ clawde myproject/
  Scanning Python files... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100%

Inline Import Analysis

 Status      File:Line             Import                                          Reason
 🟢 Skipped  manage.py:13          from django.core.management import              Inside try/except block
                                   execute_from_command_line
 🟢 Skipped  apps/team/cache.py:9  from .models import AboutPage  # noqa: PLC0415  Marked with # noqa
 🟢 Skipped  apps/til/apps.py:18   from .signals import post_delete  # noqa        Marked with # noqa
 🟡 Move     apps/blog/0024.py:16  from wagtail.images import get_image_model
 🟡 Move     apps/blog/0024.py:17  from wagtail.models import Page, Site

Total: 5 imports analyzed
To Move: 2
Skipped: 3

Note: This was a dry-run. No files were modified.
Use --write to apply changes.

What it does

For every .py file under the given paths, clawde parses the source with ast and looks for import / from ... import statements inside function bodies. Each finding is reported as:

Hidden directories (any path segment starting with .) are always skipped — this catches .git, .venv, .tox, .mypy_cache, .ruff_cache, .pytest_cache, and so on.

In addition, the following directory names are skipped by default:

• node_modules
• venv
• build
• dist
• __pycache__
• site-packages
• htmlcov

Configuration

You can override the named exclude list by adding a [tool.clawde] section to your pyproject.toml:

[tool.clawde]
exclude = ["build", "dist", "node_modules", "vendor", "generated"]

• The list replaces the default — include any defaults you still want.
• Entries are matched against path segments (folder names), not full paths or globs.
• Hidden directories are skipped regardless of this setting.
• Set exclude = [] to scan every non-hidden directory.

clawde looks for a pyproject.toml by walking up from the current working directory.