Debug how vim calls makeprg

Question

I'm trying to set up pylint to work with :make command in Vim 8.2.

I've set :compiler pylint but running :make gives me pylint's help message, so some arguments seem to be passed incorrectly.

:set makeprg? is

makeprg=pylint --output-format=text --msg-template="{path}:{line}:{column}:{C}: [{symbol}] {msg}" --reports=no

I've tried to run this command directly in the terminal (appending the filename) and it worked -- output was the list of errors, not help message.

Unfortunately, I don't see which exact command vim is trying to execute. Any hints on what I did wrong or how to debug it?

I'd like to stick to vim's default functionality as much as possible and not use any plugins for this.

Answer 1

how to debug it?

You can use the :verbose command to increase verbosity of a specific command.

In this particular case, you need verbosity level above 3 to see the actual shell command executed by Vim, so this should work:

:4verbose make
Calling shell to execute: "pylint --output-format=text --msg-template="{path}:{line}:{column}:{C}: [{symbol}] {msg}" --reports=no  2>&1| tee /tmp/abcde12/3"

Any hints on what I did wrong?

As @D. Ben Knoble pointed out, you're missing the name of the current file in the execution of the command. You can either fix it by passing it to the :make command, with :make %, or you can actually incorporate the % into makeprg itself, since it will expand % before running the command:

:let &makeprg = 'pylint --output-format=text --msg-template="{path}:{line}:{column}:{C}: [{symbol}] {msg}" --reports=no %'

Note the % at the end of the command-line. If you incorporate % into makeprg, then simply running :make will work to run pylint on your current file.

Answer 2

(Thanks to @d-ben-knoble)

makeprg does not include filename, so

:make %

should be used to lint the current file