Vim's quickfix and GCC 4.5

I’ve been using Vim more and more as my primary editor both at home and at work. Recently I’ve started using its quickfix support too to run make and then navigate to the errors.

I hit a problem where in the version of Vim in Ubuntu doesn’t have support for the newer format error messages in gcc 4.5, misinterpreting the “In file XX at line YY:ZZ” message. The most recent Vim has a fix, but if, like me, you don’t have much appetite for installing non-system versions of things like Vim, then you can fix up the error parsing by putting this in your .vimrc:

set errorformat=%*[^\"]\"%f\"%*\\D%l:\ %m,\"%f\"%*\\D%l:\ %m,%-G%f:%l:\ (Each\ undeclared\ identifier\ is\ reported\ only\ once,%-G%f:%l:\ for\ each\ function\ it\ appears\ in.),%-GIn\ file\ included\ from\ %f:%l:%c:,%-GIn\ file\ included\ from\ %f:%l:%c,%-GIn\ file\ included\ from\ %f:%l,%-Gfrom\ %f:%l:%c,%-Gfrom\ %f:%l,%f:%l:%c:%m,%f(%l):%m,%f:%l:%m,\"%f\"\\,\ line\ %l%*\\D%c%*[^\ ]\ %m,%D%*\\a[%*\\d]:\ Entering\ directory\ `%f',%X%*\\a[%*\\d]:\ Leaving\ directory\ `%f',%D%*\\a:\ Entering\ directory\ `%f',%X%*\\a:\ Leaving\ directory\ `%f',%DMaking\ %*\\a\ in\ %f,%f\|%l\|\ %m

I’m also experimenting with some alternative bindings to replace me typing :make. So far I’m using control-F10 to build and show errors, and F3, F4 to navigate between errors with:

function Make() 
    silent make
    redraw!
    cw 8
    echo getqflist()[-1].text
endfunction

nnoremap <c-F10> :call Make()<CR>
nnoremap <F4> :cnext<CR>
nnoremap <F3> :cprev<CR>

It’s by no means perfect as you get no feedback during the make process itself (which is rubbish), but it’s a start.