Question

I found the following code snippet on the internet, and want to use it in my own .vimrc.

augroup CodeFormatters
    autocmd!

    autocmd  BufReadPost,FileReadPost   *.py    :silent %!PythonTidy.py
augroup END

However, I’m not quite sure where to put the PythonTidy.py script, so that it is accessible from everywhere.
Furthermore I read that using BufReadPre is better than BufReadPost, respectively FileReadPre, is that true?

Answer 1

As it stands, PythonTidy.py must be accessible through your PATH. If you have a convenient place already contained in there, e.g. ~/bin, just place it there.

Alternatively, you can place it somewhere into your .vim directory, and use something like expand('<sfile>:p:h') to resolve the directory of your Vimscript, and build a relative path from there.

As you want to filter the read buffer contents with the :%! command, you have to use the BufReadPost event; with BufReadPre, the buffer hasn’t yet been read and nothing would be sent to the filter.