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testing.vim is a testing tool for Vim with a design loosely inspired by Go's testing package. It includes support for testing syntax highlighting, benchmarking, and syntax highlighting, linting, and coverage reports (via covimerage).

Example

Annotated example test function (original):

fun! Test_cursor_offset() abort
    " Create a new bufer, and add three lines to it. Make sure the cursor is on
    " the third line.
    new
    call append(0, ['€', 'aaa', 'bbb'])
    call cursor(3, 0)

    " Call the function we want to test and ensure we have the correct output.
    let l:out = gopher#internal#cursor_offset()
    call assert_equal(8, l:out)

    " Again with a different parameter.
    let l:out = gopher#internal#cursor_offset(1)
    call assert_equal(':#8', l:out)

    " Write the buffer; it's chdir()'ed to a tmp dir, so it's fine to just write
    " stuff.
    silent w off

    " Ensure filename is added.
    let l:out = gopher#internal#cursor_offset(1)
    call assert_equal(g:test_tmpdir . '/off:#8', l:out)
endfun

Usage

testing.vim is not a Vim plugin. Clone/download it and run the tvim script to launch it. You can put this directory in your PATH, or use make to install it:

$ make install                     # To /usr/local
$ PREFIX=~/.local make install     # Non-root install.

The test of the documentation will assume tvim is in PATH.

Run tvim test path/to/file_test.vim to run tests in that file, tvim test path/to/dir to run all test files in a directory, or tvim test path/to/dir/... to run al test files in a directory and all subdirectories, excluding testdata directories.

Tests are stored as *_test.vim files, all functions matching the Test_\k+() abort signature will be run. It is customary – but not mandatory – to store n_test.vim files next to the n.vim file in the same directory.

testing.vim exposes several variables:

g:test_verbose    -v flag from commandline (0 or 1).
g:test_debug      -d flag from commandline (0 or 1).
g:test_run        -r flag from commandline, as a string.
g:test_bench      -b flag from commandline, as a string.
g:test_dir        Directory of the test file that's being run.
g:test_tmpdir     Empty temp directory for writing; this is also set as the
                  working directory before running tests.
g:test_packdir    Directory of the plugin in the temporary directory (this
                  is a link to the REAL plugin, so don't modify files!)
g:bench_n         Number of times to run target code during benchmark.

And a few functions:

Error(msg)        Add a message to v:errors.
Errorf(msg, ...)  Like Error(), but with printf() support.
Log(msg)          Add a "log message" in v:errors; this won't fail the test.
                  Useful since :echom and v:errors output isn't interleaved.
Logf(msg, ...)    Like Log, with with printf() support.
TestSyntax()      Test syntax highlighting. Usually you want to generate
                  this with test-syntax.

A test is considered to be "failed" when v:errors has any items that are not marked as informational (as done by Log()). Vim's assert_* functions write to v:errors, and it can be written to as any list. You don't need to use Error().

You can filter test functions to run with the -r option. See tvim help test for various other options.

Another very useful option is -d, which will leave the Vim instance used to run the tests open so you can use this to inspect the state. Very useful if you don't understand why a test fails.

testing.vim will run the binary form the TEST_VIM environment variable, defaulting to vim. Managing different Vim installations is out-of-scope for this project.

See e.g. jumpy.vim for an example Travis integration

Syntax highlighting tests

You can generate tests for syntax highlighting with tvim gen-syn. How it works:

  1. Write a test file for the syntax to test; for example basic.go with the contents:

    package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    var msg = "Let's go!"
    fmt.Println(msg)
}

  2. Verify that the highlighting is correct in this file.

  3. Run tvim gen-syn syntax/test/basic.go > syntax/test/go_test.vim; this will generate a test script recording the current syntax highlighting.

  4. Test the file as any other _test.vim script.

Linting

Linting works like testing: tvim lint ./....

Currently supported lint tools:

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are also loaded from *_test.vim files. Benchmark functions match the pattern Benchmark_\k+() abort.

Use tvim test -b to select which benchmarks to run. Use -b . to run them all.

A benchmark is expected to run the benchmarked code g:bench_n number of times.

Example:

fun! Benchmark_trim() abort
  let l:s = '  hello  '
  for i in range(0, g:bench_n)
    call gopher#internal#trim(l:s)
  endfor
endfun

Syntax highlighting benchmarks

You can benchmark syntax highlighting with tvim bench-syntax file.go:666. The 666 refers to the line number to jump to before running the benchmark.

The default is to redraw! 100 times; this can be changed with an optional second argument: tvim bench-syntax file.go:666 5000.

Tips for improving performance:

  • Try to reduce the COUNT; a lot of syntax can only appear in certain places, so there is no need for Vim to look on every line. For example:

    syn region goBuildTag start="//\s*+build\s"rs=s+2 end="$"

    This works perfectly well; but build tags can only appear in comments, so this:

    syn region goBuildTag contained [..]
syn region goComment start="//" end="$" contains=goBuildTag

    Will be faster, as Vim won't have to look for the pattern on most lines of the file, just files that are already marked as goComment.

  • Make the regexp "fail" as soon as possible, for example these two are identical in behaviour:

    syn match       goSingleDecl      /\(import\|var\|const\) [^(]\@=/
syn match       goSingleDecl      /^\s*\(import\|var\|const\) [^(]\@=/

    But the second version is a lot faster due to the ^\s*; The regular expression can stop matching much faster for most lines.

Rationale

My philosophy of testing is that it should be kept as simple as feasible; programming is already hard enough without struggling with a poorly documented unintuitive testing framework. This is what makes testing.vim different from some other Vim testing tools.

My requirements:

  1. Easy to run test, including just a single test function.
  2. Easy to see what failed exactly.
  3. Easy to debug failing tests, e.g. with printf-debugging.
  4. Reasonably intuitive for anyone familiar with VimScript.

None of the existing tools met these. Some of them didn't even meet any of them!

Credits

I originally implemented this for vim-go, based on Fatih Arslan's previous work (see 1157, 1158, and 1476), which was presumably inspired by runtest.vim in the Vim source code repository.