Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 108

Customize the External Compiler

Vim’s :make command isn’t limited to calling the external make program; it can execute any compilers available on your machine. (Note that Vim’s definition of “compiler” is looser than what you may be used to; see ​‘:compiler’ and ‘:make’ Are Not Just for Compiled Languages​.) In this tip, we’ll set up the :make command so that it passes a JavaScript file through JSLint and then uses the output to populate the quickfix list.

First, we’ll configure Vim so that running :make calls nodelint,^[26] a command-line interface to JSLint.^[27] It depends on Node.js and can be installed using NPM simply by running this:^[28]

$ npm install nodelint -g

As a test case, we’ll use this JavaScript implementation ...