errorformat error munging

[William Lovas]

Hi all,

I sent a question a couple of days ago about "errorformat", but it was
perhaps too ill-formed to garner a reply :)  Here's a simpler one:

When vim's quickfix mode recognizes a compiler error as "valid", it munges
the error in the error window to its own uniform format.  Is there anyway
to preserve the error as it was originally output by the compiler?  This
would have at least two benefits:

(1) one could use "au BufReadPost quickfix" on the error window to do
some extra action for valid errors, using the entire message as it
was output by the compiler, and

(2) people who have grown very accustomed to reading and recognizing
their compiler's error messages would not have to acclimate
themselves to a new format.

cheers,
William

errorformat: 2 positions?

[William Lovas]

Hi all,

Vim's quickfix mode is great for jumping to a file position where an error
occurs.  However, many compilers produce error messages that point not just
to a particular line and column in a file, but in fact an entire region
bounded by two such positions.  Is there a way for vim to access this
information intelligently?  It looks like the dictionary returned by
getqflist only supports one position.

I've even thought of trying to re-parse the error lines using an
autocommand on the quickfix BufRead, but once :make runs, the "valid"
errors are replaced by a uniform string, which in the case of a
two-position error contains less information than the original string.

It would be really handy to support two positions, e.g. to be able to
highlight an error-containing region using the :match command.

cheers,
William