enable linting on file open

[garretwilson]

The linter-tidy plugin has a very strange behavior, and @Arcanemagus tells me it is an issue with linter itself and that I should file a bug here.

If I open an HTML file, linter-tidy doesn't kick in... until I modify the file and save it! I'm not talking about dynamic lint-as-I-type---I'm talking about just opening the file! It seems there's no way to know what is wrong with my file unless I pretend to edit it (perhaps add a line) and then save it. I'm not aware of any tool (Komodo, Eclipse, etc.) that works that way---they just do the syntax checking immediately when I open the file.

@Arcanemagus tells me this is a limitation of linter. See AtomLinter/linter-tidy#25 (comment)

[steelbrain]

I'm personally 👎 on this as I often open third-party code in my editor to find our their APIs and internal workings. This would show me a lot of unnecessary stuff

[Arcanemagus]

FYI @garretwilson you can save a file even without making changes to the code, this still triggers the save event.

I wouldn't be against an option to enable always linting all files on open, as long as the default was off.

[garretwilson]

you can save a file even without making changes to the code, this still triggers the save event.

But seriously, what an awkward workaround! I have to rewrite bytes to a file---even identical ones---just to trigger a file check?? That could not be called anything but "kludge".

Why are we making the edge cases govern the default behavior? If there are some files you want to ignore, make a feature to ignore certain files.

[steelbrain]

@garretwilson

PS. Just press ctrl+s without any change at all and it'll lint your code

[florianb]

I think the user should be able to choose if opening triggers a lint, too. So i'm for a config-option here: 👍

[azawawi]

A config option is the best solution imho 👍

[steelbrain]

I don't mind a config if it's disabled by default

[julesjulian]

My understanding is that linters specifying lintOnFly as true check the files when they are opened anyway. How do you deal with this, @steelbrain? Or do you just not use any of those linters?

[steelbrain]

@julesjulian I do use one of those linters and lintOnFly ones don't really trigger automatically on open, they trigger on text manipulation even without save. So I would say that's the expected behavior

[Arcanemagus]

@julesjulian I just put something together in my head that might explain something... I have editorconfig installed on my Atom instance and there are a few bugs on it's repo mentioning that it is modifying the text on open no matter what... I normally only see that when it has to fix the line endings but maybe it's triggering a lint even though the contents don't change so Atom doesn't show the file as modified?

That might explain why I see files linted on open with lintOnFly linters.

[BrownBear2]

I agree with @garretwilson that this should be default (but you should be able to turn it off).
The linter also should probably turn itself off by default for 3rd party applications as determined by Atoms "ignored names" setting.

[dirk-thomas]

We ran into a similar case where a new editor tab (which hasn't been saved yet) is not being linted either. If that is a use case some of you are also interested in please consider commenting on #1235.

[4refael]

Just wanted to add my +1 for this feature. I switched from another editor and really used to this behavior.