How to efficiently "make" with Vim

Question

Hi,

what I am triing to do seems a very basic stuff, but I can't find anything about it. I am working on a project built as usual:

project
|-- bin
|-- inc
`-- src

I would like to make my project using the make command included in Vim. But each time I have to specify :make -C ../. I would prefer, if there is not Makefile file in the current directory, go in the parent directory. I already do that with

set tags+=./tags;/

in my .vimrc

Furthermore, the make is by default ugly. Are there options to add color to make, and allow a direct access to the errors (as in emacs).

Thanks

Answer 1

set makecmd="make -C .." in your .vimrc

Answer 2

To answer your second question, you can navigate through the errors using the quickfix functionality in VIM. Quickfix stores the errors in a buffer and allows you to navigate forward/backwards through them.

You may have to define the error regexp to allow VIM to identify these from Make's output, but I seem to remember that it works out-of-the-box rather well (I've had to modify how it works for Java Ant builds - obviously doesn't apply here)

Answer 3

Slight modification of what Adam said:

 :set makeprg=[[\ -f\ Makefile\ ]]\ &&\ make\ \\\|\\\|\ make\ -C\ ..

Unescaped, this is

 [[ -f Makefile ]] && make || make -C ..

which means, pseudo code style

 if file-exists(Makefile) 
 then make
 else make -C ..

This only goes one directory up. If you'd like a more general solution that will go as many directories up as necessary, you'll need to be able to search ancestor directories until a Makefile is found, and I'm not sure how to do that simply from the command line. But writing a script (in whatever language you prefer) and then calling it from your makeprg shouldn't be hard.

Answer 4

The solution of rampion is a first step, but computed on vim load. When I load a multi tab session, the path can be inconsistent from one tab to another.

Here my solution (+ extra with tabnew).

fun! SetMkfile()
  let filemk = "Makefile"
  let pathmk = "./"
  let depth = 1
  while depth < 4
    if filereadable(pathmk . filemk)
      return pathmk
    endif
    let depth += 1
    let pathmk = "../" . pathmk
  endwhile
  return "."
endf

command! -nargs=* Make tabnew | let $mkpath = SetMkfile() | make <args> -C $mkpath | cwindow 10

Answer 5

By far the easiest solution is to have a Makefile in your src directory, which is the way that many, many projects are set up regardless of editor/IDE. You can still have a top-level Makefile that calls make -C src, with the rules for building in src located in src where they belong.