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, shellcheck
Bourne Shell	-n flag, shellcheck
C	gcc
C++ (filetype cpp)	gcc
CoffeeScript	coffee, coffeelint
CSS	csslint
Cython (pyrex filetype)	cython
D	dmd^
Fortran	gcc
Haskell	ghc
HTML	HTMLHint, tidy
JavaScript	eslint, jscs, jshint
JSON	jsonlint
Perl	perl -c, perl-critic
PHP	php -l, phpcs
Pug	pug-lint
Python	flake8
Ruby	rubocop
SASS	sass-lint
SCSS	sass-lint, scss-lint
Scala	scalac
TypeScript	tslint
Verilog	iverilog, verilator
Vim	vint
YAML	yamllint

^ 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.

Options

A full list of options supported for configuring this plugin in your vimrc file for all given linters is as follows:

Option	Description	Default
g:ale_echo_cursor	echo errors when the cursor is over them	1
g:ale_echo_msg_format	string format to use for the echoed message	'%s'
g:ale_echo_msg_error_str	string used for error severity in echoed message	'Error'
g:ale_echo_msg_warning_str	string used for warning severity in echoed message	'Warning'
g:ale_lint_delay	milliseconds to wait before linting	200
g:ale_linters	a dictionary of linters to whitelist	not set
g:ale_lint_on_enter	lint when opening a file	1
g:ale_lint_on_save	lint when saving a file	0
g:ale_lint_on_text_changed	lint while typing	1
g:ale_set_loclist	set the loclist with errors	1
g:ale_set_signs	set gutter signs with error markers	has('signs')
g:ale_sign_column_always	always show the sign gutter	0
g:ale_sign_error	the text to use for errors in the gutter	'>>'
g:ale_sign_offset	an offset for sign ids	1000000
g:ale_sign_warning	the text to use for warnings in the gutter	'--'
g:ale_statusline_format	string format to use in statusline flag	['%d error(s)', '%d warning(s)', 'OK']
g:ale_warn_about_trailing_whitespace	enable trailing whitespace warnings for some linters	1

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 = '--'

Statusline

You can use ALEGetStatusLine() to integrate ALE into vim statusline. To enable it, you should have in your statusline settings

%{ALEGetStatusLine()}

When errors are detected a string showing the number of errors will be shown. You can customize the output format using the global list g:ale_statusline_format where:

• The 1st element is for errors
• The 2nd element is for warnings
• The 3rd element is for when no errors are detected

e.g

let g:ale_statusline_format = ['⨉ %d', '⚠ %d', '⬥ ok']

Customize echoed message

There are 3 global options that allow customizing the echoed message.

• g:ale_echo_msg_format where:
  • %s is the error message itself
  • %linter% is the linter name
  • %severity is the severity type
• g:ale_echo_msg_error_str is the string used for error severity.
• g:ale_echo_msg_warning_str is the string used for warning severity.

So for example this:

let g:ale_echo_msg_error_str = 'E'
let g:ale_echo_msg_warning_str = 'W'
let g:ale_echo_msg_format = '[%linter%] %s [%severity%]'

Will give you:

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.