5.4 KiB
ALE - Asynchronous Lint Engine
ALE (Asynchronous Lint Engine) is a plugin for providing linting in NeoVim and Vim 8 while you edit your text files.
ALE makes use of NeoVim and Vim 8 job control functions and timers to run linters on the contents of text buffers and return errors as text is changed in Vim. This allows for displaying warnings and errors in files being edited in Vim before files have been saved back to a filesystem.
In other words, this plugin allows you to lint while you type.
Supported Languages and Tools
This plugin supports the following languages and tools. All available tools will be run in combination, so they can be complementary.
Language | Tools |
---|---|
Bash | -n flag |
Bourne Shell | -n flag, shellcheck |
C | gcc |
CoffeeScript | coffeelint |
CSS | csslint^ |
D | dmd^ |
Fortran | gcc |
Haskell | ghc^ |
JavaScript | eslint, jscs, jshint |
Python | flake8 |
Ruby | rubocop |
TypeScript | tslint^ |
Vim | vint^ |
^ Supported only on Unix machines via a wrapper script.
If you would like to see support for more languages and tools, please create an issue or create a pull request. If your tool can read from stdin or you have code to suggest which is good, support can be happily added for more tools.
Usage
Once this plugin is installed, while editing your files in supported languages and tools which have been correctly installed, this plugin will send the contents of your text buffers to a variety of programs for checking the syntax and semantics of your programs. By default, linters will be re-run in the background to check your syntax when you open new buffers or as you make edits to your files.
This plugin offers a variety of global flags for turning options on or off, all of which are given defaults and described in the flags file. Linting on open, setting of signs, populating the loclist, and so forth may all be configured as desired.
Selecting Particular Linters
By default, all available tools for all supported languages will be run.
If you want to only select a subset of the tools, simply create a
g:ale_linters
dictionary in your vimrc file mapping filetypes
to lists of linters to run.
let g:ale_linters = {
\ 'javascript': ['eslint'],
\}
For all languages unspecified in the dictionary, all possible linters will be run for those languages, just as when the dictionary is not defined. Running many linters should not typically obstruct editing in Vim, as they will all be executed in separate processes simultaneously.
This plugin will look for linters in the ale_linters
directory.
Each directory within corresponds to a particular filetype in Vim, and each file
in each directory corresponds to the name of a particular linter.
Always showing gutter
You can keep the sign gutter open at all times by setting the g:ale_sign_column_always to 1
let g:ale_sign_column_always = 1
Customize signs
Use these options to specify what text should be used for signs:
let g:ale_sign_error = '>>'
let g:ale_sign_warning = '--'
Installation
To install this plugin, you should use one of the following methods.
For Windows users, replace usage of the Unix ~/.vim
directory with
%USERPROFILE%\_vim
, or another directory if you have configured
Vim differently. On Windows, your ~/.vimrc
file will be similarly
stored in %USERPROFILE%\_vimrc
.
Installation with Pathogen
To install this module with Pathogen,
you should clone this repository to your bundle directory, and ensure
you have the line execute pathogen#infect()
in your ~/.vimrc
file.
You can run the following commands in your terminal to do so:
cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone https://github.com/w0rp/ale.git
Installation with Vundle
You can install this plugin using Vundle by using the path on GitHub for this repository.
Plugin 'w0rp/ale'
See the Vundle documentation for more information.
Manual Installation
For installation without a package manager, you can clone this git repository into a bundle directory as with pathogen, and add the repository to your runtime path yourself. First clone the repository.
cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone https://github.com/w0rp/ale.git
Then, modify your ~/.vimrc
file to add this plugin to your runtime path.
set nocompatible
filetype off
let &runtimepath.=',~/.vim/bundle/ale'
filetype plugin on
Because the author of this plugin is a weird nerd, this is his preferred installation method.