Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17Compile Code and Navigate Errors with the Quickfix List

Vim’s quickfix list is a core feature that allows us to integrate external tools into our workflow. At its simplest, it maintains a sequence of annotated addresses comprising the filename, line number, column number (optional), and a message. Traditionally, these addresses would be a list of error messages generated by a compiler, but they could just as well be warnings from a syntax checker, linter, or any other tool that emits such output.

We’ll start off by looking at an example workflow: running make in an external shell and navigating to error messages by hand. Then we’ll introduce the :make command, seeing how it can streamline our workflow by parsing error messages from ...