Suggestion: Replacing string constants with Enums

[MrDiver]

Enhancement proposal

There are a few places in manim which work on the basis of strings as a primary structure for comparing and matching in the code. This makes using the code more difficult for the user but also harder to understand for a typechecker. The example i stumbled upon is arrange_in_grid.

manim/manim/mobject/mobject.py

Lines 2142 to 2154 in f88d64a

	def arrange_in_grid(
	self,
	rows: Optional[int] = None,
	cols: Optional[int] = None,
	buff: Union[float, Tuple[float, float]] = MED_SMALL_BUFF,
	cell_alignment: np.ndarray = ORIGIN,
	row_alignments: Optional[str] = None, # "ucd"
	col_alignments: Optional[str] = None, # "lcr"
	row_heights: Optional[Iterable[Optional[float]]] = None,
	col_widths: Optional[Iterable[Optional[float]]] = None,
	flow_order: str = "rd",
	**kwargs,
	):

manim/manim/mobject/opengl/opengl_mobject.py

Lines 884 to 896 in f88d64a

	def arrange_in_grid(
	self,
	rows: int | None = None,
	cols: int | None = None,
	buff: float | tuple[float, float] = MED_SMALL_BUFF,
	cell_alignment: np.ndarray = ORIGIN,
	row_alignments: str | None = None, # "ucd"
	col_alignments: str | None = None, # "lcr"
	row_heights: Iterable[float | None] | None = None,
	col_widths: Iterable[float | None] | None = None,
	flow_order: str = "rd",
	**kwargs,
	) -> OpenGLMobject:

Here we pass in strings for the comparison which sounds intially like a good idea. But without reading the documentation you can't know what argument to pass just by looking at the Types or using the autocomplete. Yes i know this is very specific. But with an enum like Alignment you could see that it's of type Alignment and then do something like Alignment.LEFT. I do not really know how i would do this in case of this function because there are 3 different Enums needed for this setup. But i also haven't spend much time thinking about it.

So if someone more familiar with the mechanics of Enums in python has a good idea on how to approach something like this without cluttering the namespace with 100 different enums it would be nice.

There are also the global constants LEFT,RIGHT and so on which might easily be confused with the Enum. Maybe they could be integrated somehow ? But that sounds like it would end in more spaghetti code.