Neovim, read entries from the terminal into quickfix buffer

Question

I made my own vim wrapper around ripgrep (I know there is vim-grepper, but I wanted to try customize some things).

The crux of it is I populate a quickfix window as follows:

let searchString = input('Search in Files '.getcwd().': ')
silent cexpr system('rg -H --no-heading --column '.searchString)
silent copen

There are two problems with this cexpr approach:

1. It jumps to the first match (which I find disorientating).
2. It blocks editing.

To solve these issues, I have searched around, andit seems asynchronous jobs require hundreds of lines of code, or plugin helpers (which I am trying to avoid so I can hopefully turn this tool into a plugin). One way seems to be just to use Neovim's terminal:

        terminal rg -H --no-heading --column 'search expression'

This is quite easy to do. However the only part I don't know how to do is pull in the lines into a quickfix window. Under [:h cexpr] There seems to be a hint about pulling in certain lines from a file:

:cexpr getline(1, '$')

How does one reference the lines from the terminal buffer, so one can pull them into the quick fix window? And even better update the Quickfix window in realtime as entries are found?

Answer 1

Paging through the help this morning, I stumbled across cbuffer, which reads values from a buffer:

:cb[uffer][!] [bufnr]   Read the error list from the current buffer.
            When [bufnr] is given it must be the number of a
            loaded buffer.  That buffer will then be used instead
            of the current buffer.
            A range can be specified for the lines to be used.
            Otherwise all lines in the buffer are used.
            See |:cc| for [!].