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How to populate the quickfix list or location list of Vim/Neovim with arbitrary linter output?

February 15, 2022

Say I just ran a linter in the terminal and I have a bunch of linter output in the standard format:

path/to/some/file.foo:45:23: This is an error message
path/to/some/file.foo:46:12: This is another error message
...

I am currently opening each file manually in Neovim, navigating to the correct line and fixing the issue.

Instead, I want to populate the quickfix or location list in Vim or Neovim with this information so I can quickly jump to each spot and fix the error.

What would be the simplest/quickest way to achieve this?

>Solution :

That’s what the :help -q command-line flag is for:

$ vim -q filewitherrors

You can redirect the output of your linter to a file and then pass that file to Vim’s -q:

$ yourlinter file.foo > filewitherrors
$ vim -q filewitherrors

If your shell allows it, you can use process substitution to remove intermediary steps and ghost files:

$ vim -q <(yourlinter)

Or, if you already ran your linter and forgot to pass it to Vim, you can re-run it and pass it to Vim via process substitution:

$ vim -q <(!!)

Since this is a situation I often find myself in, I added this command to my bash config years ago:

# open Vim with output of last command in quickfix
vimq() {
    vim -q <($(fc -nl -1))
}

which allows me to do:

$ yourlinter file.foo
(output of linter)
$ vimq

NOTE: fc -nl -1 is a more portable—therefore preferable in a scripting context—way to recall the last command than !!. See $ man fc.

NOTE: you only mentioned the quickfix list in your question but, if you also want the quickfix window, you can add one more item to the command: :help :cwindow.