Only enable linters activated in project-specific files

[sigvaldm]

Dear community, I like ALE, but I don't like the overwhelming amount of information from linters not currently in use in projects I work on.

Currently I specify a list of linters using let g:ale_linters = ..., but, when I switch to another project where one of the linters is not in use, I get a ton of warnings. I primarily work on Python projects, and the linters in use typically have files in the root folder of the project. Flake8 have .flake8, Pylint have .pylintrc, and many linters can be configured in pyproject.toml. Is it possible to disable all linters by default, and only activate linters for files which are covered by one such config file?

[hsanson]

Maybe g:ale_linters_explicit does what you want. It will disable everything by default and only run linters defined in g:ale_linters.

I do not think ALE will ever depend on linters configuration files (e.g. .flake8) to determine which linters to run or not. There are too many possibilities and would be rather difficult to get something that works for everyone.

[w0rp]

That's the setting to use.

[sigvaldm]

Not depending on linter configuration files is an understandable design choice. g:ale_linters_explicit is helpful indeed. I'll add that I found the plugin embear/vim-localvimrc useful for project-specific settings (so long as you're allowed to store settings like these in project repositories). Having it installed, I add the following lines to .vimrc (not necessarily next to one another, but at logical places):

let g:ale_linters_explicit = 1
let g:localvimrc_persistent = 1

localvimrc allows project-specific config file .lvimrc that will apply for all files in that directory and subfolders. It is similar to the Vim exrc functionality, but it asks before loading local config, such as to prevent potential security issues. With the persistent setting above, it will only ask once per config file. As an example, I can set the linters for a project inside the .lvimrc file like so:

let g:ale_linters = {'python': ['flake8', 'mypy']}