Vim ALE

VIM is a standard for me. My UNIX career hung on my “vi” savvy which I learned appreciate from mentors who encouraged me to learn the tips and tricks of using vi. My learning curve with vi/vim has never leveled off, but rather, always gives me new features and tricks that energize me again. The latest vim “trick” is ALE (Asynchronous Lint Engine).

ALE came to light for me while working on building git hooks (especially pre-commit hooks) that force me to test and run a linter against my code before it gets committed. It has forced me (in a good way) to clean up my python code. It wasn’t as hard as I had expected and the gain is worth it. All this work using python doctest (which I love) and autopeg8 and flake8 has made me realize that much of my “after-the-fact” pain could be drastically reduced if my editor alerted me as I typed and assisted me in discovering or avoiding syntax or simple coding errors. It wasn’t until I started to work the myriad of shell scripts that I found shellcheck and in turn vim ALE.

Vim ALE can be found here Vim ALE but it can easily be installed with these commands:

mkdir -p  ~/.vim/pack/git-plugins/start
git clone https://github.com/w0rp/ale.git ~/.vim/pack/git-plugins/start/ale

Now while you edit vim ALE will run in the background (hence the ALEngine) while you edit and sets up a “gutter” on the left column to alert or notify you of issues from underlying “linters”. The initial problem I ran into was the highlighting of specific characters which needed attention. It made reading the underlying character is difficult for my old eyes so I needed a way to leave the “gutter” alerts but turn off the highlighting. So I added a line to my .vimrc to turn ALE highlighting off by default. I also run into a problem with ALE trying to run a linter against some of my plain text files so I added a line to easily toggle ALE on or off. Here is my .vimrc section for using ALE

""""""""" for ale """"""
" Install ALE with:
" mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/git-plugins/start
" git clone https://github.com/w0rp/ale.git ~/.vim/pack/git-plugins/start/ale

" next line turns off the highlighting for ALE (it makes code hard to read)
" but leaves the "gutter" notifications
let g:ale_set_highlights = 0
map <leader>at :ALEToggle<CR>

"""""""""""""""""""""""""

Only 2 active lines here but I documented how to use ALE for when I move to a new system.

BTW: A recent article discussing the history of VIM is posted here (VIM History)[[200~https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html]. It is an interesting read.

Enjoy -g-

Geoff McNamara

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.” J.R.R Tolkien

Elizabeth City, NC https://www.companionway.net



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