Using Python 3 with Emacs Jedi

April 26, 2015

Recently I'm working on a hobby project in Python, which means editing Python source files a lot. I've been using Emacs Jedi for almost as long as I've been writing Python, and it has been pretty helpful at completing away long names.

However, Jedi uses python by default, which means python2 on most of our systems at this point. Occasionally I'm writing Python 3 specific code but Jedi completes to Python 2 or refuses to complete; for the record, I enjoy writing and debugging Python 3.3+ much better than 2.7 (I realized this after trying to create a code base that is backward compatible with 2.7, which means reinventing the wheel or introducing annoying branches from time to time). So naturally I'm looking into using Python 3 in Jedi.

The official docs has been confusing and unhelpful at least for me, since it insists on setting up the virtualenv from within Emacs, and it failed for me. Why can't I set up the virtualenv myself? Turns out I can, and it's incredibly simple. The commands below assume that you have installed Jedi and friends (well, dependencies) using package.el.

mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/.python-environments
virtualenv -p /usr/local/bin/python3 ~/.emacs.d/.python-environments/jedi  # or whatever your python3 path is
# If you feel like installing the server with 'M-x jedi:install-server', also do the following
~/.emacs.d/.python-environments/jedi/bin/pip install --upgrade ~/.emacs.d/elpa/jedi-20150109.2230/  # you might need to change the version number

And that's it. Put the following in your ~/.emacs:

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'jedi:setup)
(setq jedi:complete-on-dot t)
(setq jedi:environment-root "jedi")

where the first two lines should be there whether you want to use Python 3 or not — so only the third line is new, and its meaning is obvious.

At last, start Emacs and do M-x jedi:install-server if you haven't run the pip command above yet. Restart Emacs (if necessary). That's it. Enjoy your Jedi with Python 3. (Type import conf, for instance, to be convinced that you're really autocompleting Python 3).