Mastering Vim

Using linters with Vim

A lot of common linters have associated plugins, which you can use to avoid dealing with the intricacies of each linter. However, if you have to support a custom linter, Vim lets you populate a quickfix list however you want.

You can leverage Vim's :make command, which populates a quickfix list. By default, it runs the Unix make command (no surprise here), but you can override that by setting the makeprg variable.

Quickfix expects :make output to be in a particular format, and you can try to get a linter to output in a desired format. This is error-prone, and has possible compatibility issues (if the underlying linter changes).

Add the following to your .vimrc file to override the :make behavior only when working on ...