Update (2016-03-11): this note contains instructions to setup any nodejs linter

I’ve been using source code linting for two years. It is a simple step in the development workflow that together with other best-practices improves readability and maintainability of the source code.

The integration of most part of the linters with Atom editor is usually a very simple task however to integrate them with Vim or Emacs a small effort is needed. To integrate ESLint with Vim you can use Syntastic Vim plugin and configure ESLint on it.

At first sight (reading Syntastic github README.md file) it seems to be very easy to do it and it is when you use a global instance of ESLint, however all Node.js projects I work have ESLint specific rules and versions.

Checkout below the snippet that must be added to your ~/.vimrc file to setup local ESLint (or any other linter) support to your projects.

" Syntastic local linter support

let g:syntastic_javascript_checkers = []

function CheckJavaScriptLinter(filepath, linter)
	if exists('b:syntastic_checkers')
		return
	endif
	if filereadable(a:filepath)
		let b:syntastic_checkers = [a:linter]
		let {'b:syntastic_' . a:linter . '_exec'} = a:filepath
	endif
endfunction

function SetupJavaScriptLinter()
	let l:current_folder = expand('%:p:h')
	let l:bin_folder = fnamemodify(syntastic#util#findFileInParent('package.json', l:current_folder), ':h')
	let l:bin_folder = l:bin_folder . '/node_modules/.bin/'
	call CheckJavaScriptLinter(l:bin_folder . 'standard', 'standard')
	call CheckJavaScriptLinter(l:bin_folder . 'eslint', 'eslint')
endfunction

autocmd FileType javascript call SetupJavaScriptLinter()

The code above basically searches for binary files in the node_modules/.bin folder of the current nodejs project. The snippet above covers eslint and standard linters.

I’m new to Vim / Vim Script, suggestions are welcome!