Vim: How to run `standard --format` on `save`

[daviddias]

Following this thread, one of the features I've enjoyed a lot using vim-go was its ability to run gofmt on each save, saving me a ton of work. Would love to have this functionality for JavaScript with Standard codestyle, but I'm not sure how to do it or if there is an option available out there already. Thoughts?

Thank you.

[feross]

As far as I know, Syntastic doesn't support formatters, so someone needs to write a vim plugin to do this.

[feross]

@diasdavid There is a suggestion here for how to make a plugin. https://twitter.com/feross/status/624033217016930304

Looks like it might be a one-liner!

[caspervonb]

Minor variation, primarily calling it after the file has finished writing and making it a silent operation.

autocmd bufwritepost *.js silent !standard % --format

Tested in Vim 7.3, just append it to your .vimrc file and go.

[daviddias]

This is very good stuff! Thank you!

We are almost there. Comparing to vim-go, the only thing missing is to do formatting without that confirmation. Would that be possible?

[yoshuawuyts]

Haven't verified if it works yet, but vim-autoformat was updated recently to support standard (and other linters).

[caspervonb]

That's with the post write event? was getting it with bufwrite but not with bufwritepost

[caspervonb]

If thats still the case, :set autoread should do the trick and disable the W11 warning, always re-reeading the file.

[daviddias]

rad! it works :D

autocmd bufwritepost *.js silent !standard % --format
set autoread

[caspervonb]

Just a side note, : is referring to when used as a command (like you'd denote shell commands with $ ...) In a vim script (like .vimrc) it should just be set autoread ;)

[feross]

Sweet! Glad you guys got it figured out. Thanks for the help @caspervonb!

I'll add this snippet to the readme. Should someone publish this as a standalone vim plugin? I'm not sure if the community does small modules like npm does ;)

[feross]

There was a suggestion on Twitter to persist cursor position as well: https://twitter.com/oObsi/status/624533766434910208

I haven't tested the snippet out yet. Is this actually necessary?

[cryptix]

IIRC from some buffer replacement hacking, your cursor gets reset to line 0 but i might be or did things wrong.

[daviddias]

If there are 'errors' that --format can't fix, like non used vars, the autoformat gets weird:

[caspervonb]

That's "expected", but i did not expect standard to lint and format at the same time.
@feross any way to suppress errors and just format?

[feross]

@caspervonb Can't you just ignore stdout? The formatting happens in place to the file on disk, so it's safe to just throw away that output if you don't want to show it in the UI.

I just published 5.0.0-6 which makes sure that all expected linter output goes to stdout.

[feross]

@caspervonb Also, if it's helpful, you can format a file by piping it to stdin using standard --format --stdin. The transformed code is written to stdout. Lint errors are written to stderr which can be safely ignored.

[caspervonb]

@caspervonb Can't you just ignore stdout? The formatting happens in place to the file on disk, so it's safe to just throw away that output if you don't want to show it in the UI.

@feross true you could just muffle it by redirection.

autocmd bufwritepost *.js silent !standard % --format > /dev/null

I just published 5.0.0-6 which makes sure that all expected linter output goes to stdout.

@feross did you mean stderr here? (because of below)

@caspervonb Also, if it's helpful, you can format a file by piping it to stdin using standard --format --stdin. The transformed code is written to stdout. Lint errors are written to stderr which can be safely ignored.

For vim, I think it's better to just replace do it externally and reload the buffer, don't want to mess up the command history too much.

[don-smith]

Now that the formatting feature of standard has been moved into standard-format, has anyone worked out how to apply this in vim?

[caspervonb]

@locksmithdon What is the difference? just invoke it as you would from a shell basically.

[don-smith]

@caspervonb I was missing -w and it wasn't working. I know, RTFM 😉 This works:

autocmd bufwritepost *.js silent !standard-format -w %
set autoread

[tim-phillips]

Just to close the loop since I got here from google, this is explained in the docs:

https://standardjs.com/#vim