Semistandard linting in Sublime Text

At Edenspiekermann, we recently decided to drop a custom eslint configuration file and to use semistandard instead (we could have used standard but we do like semi-colons). This move aims at normalizing our linter configuration across projects in order to facilitate cross-team work.

One challenge has been to enable semistandard linting in Sublime Text, since some of us want instant feedback in our code editor. After a few unfortunate failures and a dozen of Google searches, we finally succeeded in making it work. Here is how.

• First, install semistandard into our project’s dev dependencies:

$ npm i semistandard --save-dev

• Install SublimeLinter package.
• Install SublimeLinter-contrib-semistandard package. This has to be done after having installed SublimeLinter, as it is the core dependency.

At first, we thought this and restarting Sublime Text would be enough, but it was not. Sublime Text’s console (yes, it exists) threw an error like:

SublimeLinter: env: node: No such file or directory

We use nvm to handle npm versions so there is no global install of npm. Because of this, SublimeLinter could not run semistandard. The solution was simple, we only had to make nvm use a default version:

$ nvm alias default stable

That’s enough for SublimeLinter to run semistandard! Also, the best thing is that it uses the local semistandard version (installed in your project’s node_modules folder as a dependency), which means no version conflicts between developers!

Going further

Linting in an editor is great for quick feedback, but the real strength in semistandard or any linter is automatically linting the whole code base before a git push. We’ve done this with great success using captain-git-hook and configuring it from package.json.

Also, to avoid linting the whole code base and possibly having old and unrelated linting issues preventing us from commiting, we only lint changed files thanks to some command line magic:

git diff --name-only --staged --diff-filter=ACMRTUXB --relative | grep -E '.jsx?$' | xargs semistandard

Enjoy, and happy coding!