Lately I’ve been doing most of my testing with doctest, primarily using stand-alone text files. I generally like it (otherwise I wouldn’t be using it), but it does make me frustrated with doctest sometimes. On my wishlist (roughly in order):

I wish output was always displayed, even when there’s an exception. I see no reason for the current behavior. Really exceptions could be treated like any other output (if ELLIPSIS was on by default).

I wish you could turn on options like ELLIPSIS from within a doctest, for all expressions. ( # doctest: +ELLIPSIS on every line is beyond ugly.)

<BLANKLINE> is terribly ugly.

There’s no way of saying “I don’t care what this prints”. You can’t do: >>> some_function() ... because the ... is treated like a continuation.

Plugging in an alternate output checker is kind of tedious, and can’t be done from within a doctest (without horrible hacks).

I’d like to be able to easily jump into an interactive state from doctest. Maybe pdb can do this, but I’ve never figured that out exactly.

Getting nose to run .txt files as doctests is really hard, involving a combination of options I always forget.

There’s no way to abort the doctest. Sometimes I’d like to run some environment checks early on, and be able to stop the test if they fail.

I wish it was easier to apply to non-Python code. (I’ve adapted it via subclassing for Logo but I wouldn’t do that often.)

I wish I could copy and paste from doctests to consoles. But I don’t see any solution to this problem.

The integration with unittest is pretty hacky. Not that I’ve used unittest in years. But some other test frameworks build off this integration.