overseer.nvim VS vim-dispatch

When working on multiple projects it might be useful to define some local configuration that should be automatically loaded. This e.g. includes customized LSP configuration or adding build tasks for task runner plugins like overseer.nvim. To do that you can create .nvim.lua in your project directory and define your local settings there.

I use https://github.com/stevearc/overseer.nvim, a task/job runner kinda like the one in VS Code. You can run your builds, tests, lints, etc. with it.

overseer.nvim

There's overseer.nvim to run all sorts of things and neotest to run tests. In general, you can check awesome-neovim or TWiN to look for plugins.

Here's an example of how to configure your vim_ui_select picker for the amazing task managing plugin overseer.nvim!

I use overseer for this https://github.com/stevearc/overseer.nvim

I would like to call out that "make compiler plugins async" sounds like a simple change, but quickly becomes quite complex. Let's say you do an async :make, now you have a background process. How do you cancel it? How do you view the output? Can you hide it and then come back to it? Can you run more than one at a time? Can you view all running tasks? If you want to have only very basic controls you could do what vim-dispatch is doing, but I personally don't think it's very good. I think any solution shy of VS Code style tasks control will be insufficient, but I think the appetite for adding something that complex to core Neovim is quite low. That said, this (and more) is something I really wanted, which is why I wrote overseer.nvim

I still can't get testing and debugging tests down, so I am going back to intellij or goland to do that. I have been at it for about 3 weeks now. I spent so much time setting up my config. haha. Having said that, I really like Overseer https://github.com/stevearc/overseer.nvim

overseer.nvim

Tis is good for the compilation to make it async( otherwise it blocks) https://github.com/tpope/vim-dispatch it wraps around the built in make/makeprg feature. Would recommend that you dont do it with large builds/outputs.

vim-dispatch by the legend Tim Pope. send the task to the background, keep using editor. once the task is finished, it output to qflist buffer

The other answer here covers everything you need, but if you want a plugin-based solution you might be interested in vim-dispatch which runs command line tools asynchronously, and offers the option to run the command in the background instead with :Dispatch!.

You should check :h compiler :h make and :h 'errorformat'. You could also check vim dispatch, a plugin that enhances this features

Also plugin supports asynchronous execution (using terminal, jobs or vim-dispatch).

Do note that :make is blocking, and you need to wait until it finishes before it sends you back to the editor. If you want it to be asynchronouns, you can install vim-dispatch + vim-dispatch-neovim for Neovim support in vim-dispatch.

if you want something to work out of the box, is async and is already configured per language, check out TPope's dispatch

For long-running programs, like compiling, or running full test suites, or running terraform on a decently sized infrastructure project, I may run them with :Make (courtesy of tpope/vim-dispatch) so I can keep working on the project while the external program is running. If I'm in an environment without vim plugins, I may spawn a new tmux pane/window. As a last resort, I will ctrl-z/fg if I don't have tmux on the remote system (e.g. dev containers).