credmp

Today I am going to share one of the more amazing pieces of elisp that I have run across… it’s not that it is remarkable code or something, it is simply that it proves to be helpfull beyond compare. It is called flymake and allows you to see the nifty things that IDE users are so used to… (a picture says more then a thousand words; showing 1 error (missing std::) and 1 warning (unused variable))

I had to do some things to get it working in my project though; firstly I needed to add a check-syntax target in my makefiles:

.PHONY: check-syntax
check-syntax:
        $(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -fsyntax-only $(SRCS)

I changed to font settings for the error and warning faces to do some underlining.

 '(flymake-errline ((((class color)) (:underline "OrangeRed"))))
 '(flymake-warnline ((((class color)) (:underline "yellow"))))

And finally I hooked up to c-mode-common-hook to turn on flymake automatically and set up a keybinding to quickly see the next error message:

;; flymake
(defun my-flymake-show-next-error()
  (interactive)
  (flymake-goto-next-error)
  (flymake-display-err-menu-for-current-line)
  )
 
;;
;; Setting some C / C++ defaults
;;
(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook
          (function (lambda ()
                      ;; more stuff here
                      (flymake-mode t)
                      (global-set-key "C-cC-v" 'my-flymake-show-next-error)
                      )))

The neat thing is that there are also on the fly syntax checking additions for PHP, Ruby, Action Script 3 and some more