I just noticed that linting with python make test flake seems to be ignoring failures. See any recent CI run and expand the "Lint with flake8" section.

This is due to a change in flake8 where its main function used to exit on failure, but now only returns a status code. So this always succeeds:
https://github.com/vispy/vispy/blob/e71b275f0bd92d3fc082fdf87f11c490705ef76a/vispy/testing/_runners.py#LL167C19-L167C19

I am happy to make a PR to fix this small issue (and the linting issues that have crept in as a result), but when searching for an existing issue I found this one. Instead I would be interested in adding a pre-commit config if that's the direction you'd lake to take this anyway.

I'm good with a pre-commit. I'd also be OK trying to use ruff instead of flake8 and all the other tools. I can also enable pre-commit.ci on this repository so it automatically runs pre-commit.

Not sure how the other @vispy/core maintainers feel, but I kind of just want to enable black on the whole repository.

but I kind of just want to enable black on the whole repository.

numpydoc did this about a year ago and we did it a few months ago for MNE-Python. No regrets. Same goes for ruff replacing flake8 and pyflakes.

Again I'm happy to do some of the tedious work if others are willing to provide sanity checks and review. I can open a PR at least to see what this could look like if that's welcome.

A quick test locally shows some issues where there is a bit of Python magic going on (undefined symbols, etc.) so my instinct is to exclude some of the files in codegen and vispy/gloo/gl, at least to start.

I think excluding codegen is fine. I thought I cleaned up most of the flake8 issues in it, but definitely any of the files that codegen generates (which I think are the ones in vispy/gloo/gl) should be excluded.