Making the most of vim: ant and javac

With a bit of rather tricky configuration it is possible integrate vim, ant and javac (the standard Java compiler).

First, vim allows us to set an external program to be called for the :make command. This goes in ~/.vimrc

set makeprg=ant

Now, when you issue a :make command to vim, it will call ant to build the project. Now with a bit more configuration, we can get vim to parse the error messages from javac and step through them.

Back to ~/.vimrc to tell vim what javac's messages look like:

set efm=\ %#[javac]\ %#%f:%l:%c:%*\\d:%*\\d:\ %t%[%^:]%#:%m,\%A\ %#[javac]\ %f:%l:\ %m,%-Z\ %#[javac]\ %p^,%-C%.%#

Make sure that horrendous code goes on one line. It came from a bit of head scratching and a lot of vim's documentation.

Now, after a :make you can step forward and back through the compiler messages using :cn and :cp.

That is all the IDE I need -- just enough help without getting in the way.