Building Custom Quick Fix Buffers in Vim From JSON

- 2 minutes read - 245 words

Recently at work we decided to run a linter to check our spelling. This produced a lot of output from years of, uhm, typos. The errors found (and exceptions that needed to go into our custom dictionary!) were saved in a JSON file. I was looking for a way to use this JSON file to help vim help me work through this backlog efficiently. Vim proved up to the challenge when I configured the following values correctly.

  • :makeprg
  • :make
  • The quickfix window
  • :errorformat

I’ll give a strategy for using these in the extended post.

Image of vim’s quickfix window

Vim’s quickfix window can use the program specified in :makeprg, as invoked by the :make command, to create an input source that it can parse, with the help of configuration of the :errorformat string, into a list of easily traversable, linked-to-the exact file location, “quickfix” links.

One can open up the quickfix window with :copen. A number of convenient shortcuts make slicing through it efficient. :cnext will advance to the next error, :cprev to the previous, :cfn to the next file (“Oh heck, there’s a bunch of custom stuff in this file that’s safe to ignore.”). I went so far as to bind \] and \[ to :cnext and :cprev to make things even faster.

Nevertheless, iterating to the precise configuration took some work. I needed a way to bootstrap my development loop. To that end, I found the following resources supremely helpful.