How I broke free from pd.set_option (and probably some best practices, too) in my python pandas code.

Every one of my python scripts, Jupyter notebooks, IPython console sessions, etc has long began with the omnipresent imports and settings override:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# *_* coding: utf-8 *_*

# author: Graham Duncan
# date: 2020-06-18

"""
module docstring - short summary

If the description is long, the first line should be a short summary that makes sense on its own,
separated from the rest by a newline
"""




import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

pd.set_option('display.width', 1500)
pd.set_option('display.max_columns', 25)

This is a whole lot of shit, and the IDE won’t collapse it all together (and never collapses the settings overrides which is annoying.

So I did a thing, which is probably the wrong thing, but No Ragrets (so far):

I found the declarations of the default settings and just hard coded overrides in (mind you, I already did the actually smart thing of editing startup files for IPython and Jupyter, so don’t @ me.

The file of interest is in the core module of your pandas package, and the file is named config_init.py.

/your-path-to-python-interpreter/python3.8/site-packages/pandas/core/config_init.py

So mine, for instance, is:

/Libary/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pandas/core/config_init.py

For any (probably ill-advised) fellow travelers out there, if you want to give it a shot..the place where the magic happens is:

with cf.config_prefix("display"):
    cf.register_option("precision", 6, pc_precision_doc, validator=is_nonnegative_int)
    cf.register_option(
        "float_format",
        None,
        float_format_doc,
        validator=is_one_of_factory([None, is_callable]),
    )
    cf.register_option("column_space", 12, validator=is_int)
    cf.register_option(
        "max_info_rows",
        1690785,
        pc_max_info_rows_doc,
        validator=is_instance_factory((int, type(None))),
    )
    cf.register_option("max_rows", 60, pc_max_rows_doc, validator=is_nonnegative_int)
    cf.register_option(
        "min_rows",
        10,
        pc_min_rows_doc,
        validator=is_instance_factory([type(None), int]),
    )
    cf.register_option("max_categories", 8, pc_max_categories_doc, validator=is_int)

    def _deprecate_negative_int_max_colwidth(key):
        value = cf.get_option(key)
        if value is not None and value < 0:
            warnings.warn(
                "Passing a negative integer is deprecated in version 1.0 and "
                "will not be supported in future version. Instead, use None "
                "to not limit the column width.",
                FutureWarning,
                stacklevel=4,
            )

    cf.register_option(
        # FIXME: change `validator=is_nonnegative_int`
        # in version 1.2
        "max_colwidth",
        50,
        max_colwidth_doc,
        validator=is_instance_factory([type(None), int]),
        cb=_deprecate_negative_int_max_colwidth,
    )
    if is_terminal():
        max_cols = 25  # automatically determine optimal number of columns
    else:
        max_cols = 25  # cannot determine optimal number of columns
    cf.register_option(
        "max_columns", max_cols, pc_max_cols_doc, validator=is_nonnegative_int
    )
    cf.register_option(
        "large_repr",
        "truncate",
        pc_large_repr_doc,
        validator=is_one_of_factory(["truncate", "info"]),
    )
    cf.register_option("max_info_columns", 100, pc_max_info_cols_doc, validator=is_int)
    cf.register_option(
        "colheader_justify", "right", colheader_justify_doc, validator=is_text
    )
    cf.register_option("notebook_repr_html", True, pc_nb_repr_h_doc, validator=is_bool)
    cf.register_option("pprint_nest_depth", 3, pc_pprint_nest_depth, validator=is_int)
    cf.register_option("multi_sparse", True, pc_multi_sparse_doc, validator=is_bool)
    cf.register_option("expand_frame_repr", True, pc_expand_repr_doc)
    cf.register_option(
        "show_dimensions",
        "truncate",
        pc_show_dimensions_doc,
        validator=is_one_of_factory([True, False, "truncate"]),
    )
    cf.register_option("chop_threshold", None, pc_chop_threshold_doc)
    cf.register_option("max_seq_items", 100, pc_max_seq_items)
    cf.register_option(
        "width", 1500, pc_width_doc, validator=is_instance_factory([type(None), int])
    )
    cf.register_option(
        "memory_usage",
        True,
        pc_memory_usage_doc,
        validator=is_one_of_factory([None, True, False, "deep"]),
    )
    cf.register_option(
        "unicode.east_asian_width", False, pc_east_asian_width_doc, validator=is_bool
    )
    cf.register_option(
        "unicode.ambiguous_as_wide", False, pc_east_asian_width_doc, validator=is_bool
    )
    cf.register_option("latex.repr", False, pc_latex_repr_doc, validator=is_bool)
    cf.register_option("latex.escape", True, pc_latex_escape, validator=is_bool)
    cf.register_option("latex.longtable", False, pc_latex_longtable, validator=is_bool)
    cf.register_option(
        "latex.multicolumn", True, pc_latex_multicolumn, validator=is_bool
    )
    cf.register_option(
        "latex.multicolumn_format", "l", pc_latex_multicolumn, validator=is_text
    )
    cf.register_option("latex.multirow", False, pc_latex_multirow, validator=is_bool)
    cf.register_option(
        "html.table_schema",
        False,
        pc_table_schema_doc,
        validator=is_bool,
        cb=table_schema_cb,
    )
    cf.register_option("html.border", 1, pc_html_border_doc, validator=is_int)
    cf.register_option(
        "html.use_mathjax", True, pc_html_use_mathjax_doc, validator=is_bool
    )

You can see I just edited the inline default for max_cols = 25 and the display.width attribute to 1500.

Granted this is probably a bad idea since you’ll have to change this anytime you switch interpreters, use a new venv, or upgrade your pandas version.

But those all sound like problems for another day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯