Vim quickfix hack for IntelliJ

Vim’s quickfix mode is very useful during complex refactors. For instance, I wrote an AST-based tool to identify locations that needed a manual refactor. But how could I navigate through all the matches to perform it?

With vim it’s easy: vim -q, which starts vim in quickfix, and you can pipe in the locations from stdin or a file. You can then jump around using the quick-fix list or use :cnext to sequentially visit each match. I switched to IntelliJ + IdeaVIM years ago though, and IdeaVIM doesn’t have quick-fix support.

I realised though that IntelliJ’s CLI launcher had —line, so I could get a reasonable hack together inside a IntelliJ terminal window that let me navigate stepwise through the list:

$ refactor-tool > /tmp/quickfix.list
$ ttyv=`tty`
$ cat /tmp/quickfix | while read f; do
   echo $f
   idea ${f%:*} --line ${f#*:}
   echo hit any key to advance
   read y < $ttyv
done

The tool output in a path/to/file:linenumber format, e.g tools/foo.go:123. ${f%:*} is using % bash expansion, which returns f without the shortest match of the pattern at the end of the string. # is the same but removes matches from the start. I capture the tty and read from it to avoid just reading the next line from STDIN.

I’m excited to see IntelliJ’s scripting layer mature, which’ll enable much more powerful instances of ad-hoc scriptability.