Tim Pope supercharges the :make command, makes it asynchronous, and adds a whole bunch of syntactic sugar and additional commands to support its use. A big chunk of vim-dispatch became obsolete with Vim 8.1 rolling out terminal mode support, however, depending on your preferred workflow, integration with different terminal emulators can be very useful. You can get vim-dispatch from GitHub at https://github.com/tpope/vim-dispatch.
If you’re using vim-plug, you can install vim-dispatch by adding Plug 'tpope/vim-dispatch' to a list of your plugins and running :w | source $MYVIMRC | PlugInstall.
Here are some highlights:
- :Make allows you to run a task in a different window (only if you're using tmux, iTerm, or cmd.exe)
- :Make! kicks off a task in the background (only in tmux, Screen, iTerm, or cmd.exe)
- :Dispatch allows you to combine :compiler <compiler-name> and :make into a single command, for example, :Dispatch testrb test/models/user_test.rb
- :Dispatch can also just run arbitrary commands, for example, :Dispatch bundle install
If you find yourself using built-in :make a lot, you may want to give vim-dispatch a shot.
Technically, you can also run tests from vim-dispatch, but since tests normally don't provide standardized output, vim-dispatch cannot automatically populate the quickfix or the location lists.