Please add `signs` support (instead of underlining)
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venthur commented
Hi,
thank you very much for this nice plugin, this was really needed. I have one suggestion: could you instead of underlining problems use vim's sign API which was designed exactly for this use-case? It places little one-or-two-letter sings on the left column (e.g. EE
, WW
, or whatever you want) For an example, syntastic uses it as well (see screenshot in the link).
:help sign
1. Introduction sign-intro signs
When a debugger or other IDE tool is driving an editor it needs to be able
to give specific highlights which quickly tell the user useful information
about the file. One example of this would be a debugger which had an icon
in the left-hand column denoting a breakpoint. Another example might be an
arrow representing the Program Counter (PC). The sign features allow both
placement of a sign, or icon, in the left-hand side of the window and
definition of a highlight which will be applied to that line. Displaying the
sign as an image is most likely only feasible in gvim (although Sun
Microsystem's dtterm does support this it's the only terminal emulator I know
of which does). A text sign and the highlight should be feasible in any color
terminal emulator.
Signs and highlights are not useful just for debuggers. Sun's Visual
WorkShop uses signs and highlights to mark build errors and SourceBrowser
hits. Additionally, the debugger supports 8 to 10 different signs and
highlight colors. workshop Same for Netbeans netbeans.
There are two steps in using signs:
1. Define the sign. This specifies the image, text and highlighting. For
example, you can define a "break" sign with an image of a stop roadsign and
text "!!".
2. Place the sign. This specifies the file and line number where the sign is
displayed. A defined sign can be placed several times in different lines
and files.
When signs are defined for a file, Vim will automatically add a column of two
characters to display them in. When the last sign is unplaced the column
disappears again. The color of the column is set with the SignColumn group
hl-SignColumn. Example to set the color:
:highlight SignColumn guibg=darkgrey