The Black code style

Black reformats entire files in place. It is not configurable. It doesn’t take previous formatting into account. It doesn’t reformat blocks that start with # fmt: off and end with # fmt: on. It also recognizes YAPF’s block comments to the same effect, as a courtesy for straddling code.

How Black wraps lines

Black ignores previous formatting and applies uniform horizontal and vertical whitespace to your code. The rules for horizontal whitespace are pretty obvious and can be summarized as: do whatever makes pycodestyle happy. The coding style used by Black can be viewed as a strict subset of PEP 8.

As for vertical whitespace, Black tries to render one full expression or simple statement per line. If this fits the allotted line length, great.

# in:

l = [1,
     2,
     3,
]

# out:

l = [1, 2, 3]

If not, Black will look at the contents of the first outer matching brackets and put that in a separate indented line.

# in:

l = [[n for n in list_bosses()], [n for n in list_employees()]]

# out:

l = [
    [n for n in list_bosses()], [n for n in list_employees()]
]

If that still doesn’t fit the bill, it will decompose the internal expression further using the same rule, indenting matching brackets every time. If the contents of the matching brackets pair are comma-separated (like an argument list, or a dict literal, and so on) then Black will first try to keep them on the same line with the matching brackets. If that doesn’t work, it will put all of them in separate lines.

# in:

def very_important_function(template: str, *variables, file: os.PathLike, debug: bool = False):
    """Applies `variables` to the `template` and writes to `file`."""
    with open(file, 'w') as f:
        ...

# out:

def very_important_function(
    template: str,
    *variables,
    file: os.PathLike,
    debug: bool = False,
):
    """Applies `variables` to the `template` and writes to `file`."""
    with open(file, 'w') as f:
        ...

You might have noticed that closing brackets are always dedented and that a trailing comma is always added. Such formatting produces smaller diffs; when you add or remove an element, it’s always just one line. Also, having the closing bracket dedented provides a clear delimiter between two distinct sections of the code that otherwise share the same indentation level (like the arguments list and the docstring in the example above).

Line length

You probably noticed the peculiar default line length. Black defaults to 88 characters per line, which happens to be 10% over 80. This number was found to produce significantly shorter files than sticking with 80 (the most popular), or even 79 (used by the standard library). In general, 90-ish seems like the wise choice.

If you’re paid by the line of code you write, you can pass --line-length with a lower number. Black will try to respect that. However, sometimes it won’t be able to without breaking other rules. In those rare cases, auto-formatted code will exceed your allotted limit.

You can also increase it, but remember that people with sight disabilities find it harder to work with line lengths exceeding 100 characters. It also adversely affects side-by-side diff review on typical screen resolutions. Long lines also make it harder to present code neatly in documentation or talk slides.

If you’re using Flake8, you can bump max-line-length to 88 and forget about it. Alternatively, use Bugbear’s B950 warning instead of E501 and keep the max line length at 80 which you are probably already using. You’d do it like this:

[flake8]
max-line-length = 80
...
select = C,E,F,W,B,B950
ignore = E501

You’ll find Black’s own .flake8 config file is configured like this. If you’re curious about the reasoning behind B950, Bugbear’s documentation explains it. The tl;dr is “it’s like highway speed limits, we won’t bother you if you overdo it by a few km/h”.

Empty lines

Black avoids spurious vertical whitespace. This is in the spirit of PEP 8 which says that in-function vertical whitespace should only be used sparingly. One exception is control flow statements: Black will always emit an extra empty line after return, raise, break, continue, and yield. This is to make changes in control flow more prominent to readers of your code.

Black will allow single empty lines inside functions, and single and double empty lines on module level left by the original editors, except when they’re within parenthesized expressions. Since such expressions are always reformatted to fit minimal space, this whitespace is lost.

It will also insert proper spacing before and after function definitions. It’s one line before and after inner functions and two lines before and after module-level functions. Black will put those empty lines also between the function definition and any standalone comments that immediately precede the given function. If you want to comment on the entire function, use a docstring or put a leading comment in the function body.

Trailing commas

Black will add trailing commas to expressions that are split by comma where each element is on its own line. This includes function signatures.

Unnecessary trailing commas are removed if an expression fits in one line. This makes it 1% more likely that your line won’t exceed the allotted line length limit. Moreover, in this scenario, if you added another argument to your call, you’d probably fit it in the same line anyway. That doesn’t make diffs any larger.

One exception to removing trailing commas is tuple expressions with just one element. In this case Black won’t touch the single trailing comma as this would unexpectedly change the underlying data type. Note that this is also the case when commas are used while indexing. This is a tuple in disguise: numpy_array[3, ].

One exception to adding trailing commas is function signatures containing *, *args, or **kwargs. In this case a trailing comma is only safe to use on Python 3.6. Black will detect if your file is already 3.6+ only and use trailing commas in this situation. If you wonder how it knows, it looks for f-strings and existing use of trailing commas in function signatures that have stars in them. In other words, if you’d like a trailing comma in this situation and Black didn’t recognize it was safe to do so, put it there manually and Black will keep it.