ultan 2.1.0

Python name and documentation server

ultan

“You know old Ultan, I take it? No, course not. If you did, you’d know the way to the library.” — The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe

ultan is a Python identifier and documentation provider. It has two main services:

1. It can list all identifiers available in your current Python environment.

2. It can provide docstrings for names.

This may not sound very spectactular, and it’s not. The main trick ultan aims for is being able to provide a comprehensive list of identifiers, even for modules which are not imported. It uses various strategies to scan your installed packages for identifiers, doing things, for example, like parsing source files into ASTs and looking for assignments.

Why?

ultan is supposed to scratch a specific itch: being able to do completion on identifiers which aren’t actually available in the current namespace. For example, if I’m coding along and want to add uuid.uuid1(), standard completers won’t give me that completion unless I’ve already imported uuid. ultan will know about uuid.uuid1() even if you haven’t imported uuid, so you can get the completion.

This may be a terrible idea! But I want to give it a try.

Tests

ultan uses tox to run its tests. Here’s that works:

$ pip install -e .[test]
$ tox

There are more details to it, of course, but you can learn about those by reading the tox documentation.