Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
182 lines (143 loc) · 6.74 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

182 lines (143 loc) · 6.74 KB
Raw

Flycheck

Build Status

Flycheck provides on-the-fly syntax checking for GNU Emacs 24. Essentially it's “flymake done right” with

  • major-mode based checkers (instead of file name patterns),
  • simple declarative checker definitions (instead of init functions),
  • ready-to-use syntax checkers for a bunch of languages (instead of broken checkers using non-existing tools),
  • and a clean, concise and understandable implementation (instead of a almost 2k line mess of spaghetti code).

And this is how it looks like (the color theme is solarized-light):

Screenshot of Flycheck in action

Features

  • Automatic syntax check after saving or insertion of new lines
  • Error navigation with next-error and previous-error
  • Built-in syntax checkers for:
    • CoffeeScript
    • CSS
    • Emacs Lisp
    • Haml
    • HTML
    • Javascript
    • JSON
    • Lua
    • Perl
    • PHP
    • Python
    • Ruby
    • Sass
    • Shell scripts (Bash, Dash and Zsh)
    • TeX/LaTeX
    • XML
  • Easy customization (see flycheck-checkers)
  • Easy declarative API to define new syntax checkers

Installation

Install the ELPA package from MELPA) or Marmalade with M-x package-install RET flycheck. All dependencies are automatically installed.

Flycheck is written and tested against GNU Emacs 24.2 and newer. It should work on Emacs 24.1, too. GNU Emacs 23 and before, and other flavors of Emacs (e.g. XEmacs) are not supported.

Most checkers have dependencies against external tools that perform the checking. Use C-c ! ? to see what a checker needs, e.g. C-c ! ? python-pylint.

Usage

This section provides a short introduction to Flycheck. For complete documentation, including the declaration of new syntax checkers, refer to the Info manual of Flycheck. Open the manual with C-c ! i.

Enable flycheck-mode in your init.el file for all text editing and programming modes:

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'flycheck-mode)
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'flycheck-mode)

You may also enable Flycheck manually after visiting a file with M-x flycheck-mode.

In flycheck-mode the buffer is automatically checked on-the-fly. You can also check the buffer manually with C-c ! c.

A suitable syntax checker is automatically selected from the list of registered checkers in flycheck-checkers. Use C-c ! s to manually select a specific syntax checker, or configure the syntax checker per file by setting flycheck-checker as file local variable::

# Local Variables:
# flycheck-checker: python-pylint
# End:

Some syntax checkers read configuration files. Use M-x customize-group RET flycheck-config-files to customize these. Refer to the section Configuration in the Flycheck info manual.

Errors and warnings from the syntax checker are reported in the mode line, highlighted in the buffer and indicated with icons in the fringe. Customize flycheck-highlighting-mode to change the highlighting of errors. Refer to the sections Reporting and Mode line for more information.

Note: The default highlighting faces provided GNU Emacs are ill-suited to highlight errors. They are too easily overlooked. Make sure to customize these faces to add a striking background color or an underlying, or choose a color theme with reasonable Flycheck faces, for instance the excellent light or dark solarized themes.

Use M-g n and M-g p to navigate between errors. If the point is on an error, the error message is shown in the echo area after a short delay. You may also hover the mouse over a highlighted error to get a tooltip with the error message. See Reporting for more information.

Note: Visible compilation buffers take preference over buffers with Flycheck errors. This includes buffers from M-x compile, M-x grep and generally all buffers with Compilation Mode or Compilation Minor Mode enabled. If such a buffer is visible next-error and previous-error will navigate the errors (or grep results) reported by this buffer instead. Hide this buffer (e.g. with delete-other-windows) to navigate Flycheck errors again.

Credits

The following people contributed to flycheck:

  • Bozhidar Batsov provided valuable feedback and refinements, and brought Flycheck to a larger user base by adding it to his awesome Prelude project.
  • Damon Haley helped to shape and test the PHP CodeSniffer checker.
  • Jimmy Yuen Ho Wong added the HTML syntax checker and the jshint Javascript checker, and did valuable testing and bug fixing.
  • Marian Schubert added the Perl syntax checker.
  • Martin Grenfell created the awesome Vim library syntastic which inspired this project and many of its checkers.
  • Peter Vasil created the XML and Lua syntax checkers, added unit tests and did valuable testing.
  • steckerhalter provided the PHP CodeSniffer checker.
  • Steve Purcell implemented many checkers, contributed important ideas to the design of the checker API and engaged in worthwhile discussion to shape this project.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

See COPYING for details.