As great as version control and unit testing are for keeping your overall code organised and functional, neither actually help you right cleaner code.

• Version control will allow you to see how and when the code got as messy as it is.
• Unit tests will make sure that, despite the code being a complete mess, it still works.

If you want to stop yourself from writing messy code, you need a tool that works where the messes happen: when you're writing the code. A popular kind of tool that does is called a linter. I'm not a python developer, but it looks like Pylint might be a good option.

A linter looks at the code you've written, and compares it to a configurable set of best practices. If the linter has a rule that variables must be camelCase, and you write one in snake_case, it will flag that as a mistake. Good linters have rules ranging from "declared variables must be used" to "The cyclomatic complexity of functions must be less than 3".

Most code editors can be configured to run a linter every time you save, or just generally as you type, and indicate problems inline. If you type something like x = 7, the x will be highlighted, with an instruction to use a longer, better name (if that's what you have configured). This works like spellcheck in most word processors, making it hard to ignore, and helping to build better habits.

As great as version control and unit testing are for keeping your overall code organised and functional, neither actually help you write cleaner code.

• Version control will allow you to see how and when the code got as messy as it is.
• Unit tests will make sure that, despite the code being a complete mess, it still works.

If you want to stop yourself from writing messy code, you need a tool that works where the messes happen: when you're writing the code. A popular kind of tool that does is called a linter. I'm not a python developer, but it looks like Pylint might be a good option.

A linter looks at the code you've written, and compares it to a configurable set of best practices. If the linter has a rule that variables must be camelCase, and you write one in snake_case, it will flag that as a mistake. Good linters have rules ranging from "declared variables must be used" to "The cyclomatic complexity of functions must be less than 3".

Most code editors can be configured to run a linter every time you save, or just generally as you type, and indicate problems inline. If you type something like x = 7, the x will be highlighted, with an instruction to use a longer, better name (if that's what you have configured). This works like spellcheck in most word processors, making it hard to ignore, and helping to build better habits.