Setup

First of all, some organizational recommendations.

• Put your tests in t/ and follow the convention of ##-name.t.

  Dot-t helps prove run only your tests and nothing else. Number your tests in the order that makes sense to usually test, but avoid hard interdependencies among tests and occasionally run prove --shuffle.

• Start up vim in the base directory of the project.

  Run ctags -R here. If you use sessions, save them them here too. (Add the tags and session files to your MANIFEST.SKIP or equivalent, if you're packaging.)

• At the top of your .t files, put this line that gives you syntax highlighting.

  # vim: ts=4 sw=4 syn=perl :

  You can put in other options, of course, but if they're global to your perl preferences then .vimrc would be a better place. Alternatively, you can say au BufRead,BufNewFile *.t setfiletype=perl in ~/.vim/ftdetect/perl_test.vim — credit Ben Prew.

Using it

The idea here is that most of the time you are working from on a particular test, and when you fix something you saw broken there, that's usually the first test you want to try again after you make your fix. So we have a notion of a "current testfile" that should be easy to set (and unset), and which should be trivial to run. If you rush off to fix a bug somewhere, you don't want to lose the current test. If a test fails, you want to jump to the compilation error if there was one, or to the definition of the failed test if there wan't. If you aren't familiar with vim's quickfix feature, read about it now.

So it's simple really. Have vim load the file below^* and then you just need to know three keybindings. They all work in command mode. As a bonus, if you ,w on a code file and not on a test, a subsequent ,t will run it against perl -c to check for compilation errors.

" perltest.vim - test driven development for Perl with vim
"
"     ,t   --  Run tests
"     ,w   --  Set current file as test file. Only this test will run.
"     ,W   --  Unset current test file. All tests will run.
"
" v1.02 - Updates at http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=434793

function! Prove ( taint )
    if ! exists("g:testfile")
        let g:testfile = "t/"
    endif
    if g:testfile == "t/" || g:testfile =~ "\.t$"
       echo system("prove -lv     " . a:taint . g:testfile . " 2>&1 | 
+tee " . &errorfile)
    else
       echo system("perl -c -Ilib " . a:taint . g:testfile . " 2>&1 | 
+tee " . &errorfile)
    endif
    cfile
endfunction

nmap ,t :call  Prove ("")<cr>
nmap ,T :call  Prove ("-T ")<cr>
nmap ,w :let   g:testfile = expand("%")<cr>:echo "testfile is now" g:t
+estfile<cr>
nmap ,W :unlet g:testfile<cr>:echo "testfile undefined; will run all t
+ests"<cr>

" based on compiler/perl.vim by Christian J. Robinson <infynity@onewes
+t.net>
" added formats for test failures
set errorformat=
        \%-G%.%#had\ compilation\ errors.,
        \%-G%.%#syntax\ OK,
        \%+Anot\ ok\%.%#-\ %m,
        \%C%.%#\(%f\ at\ line\ %l\),
        \%m\ at\ %f\ line\ %l.,
        \%+A%.%#\ at\ %f\ line\ %l\\,%.%#,
        \%+C%.%#

" FIXME make this more local. Needed for redirection syntax which isn'
+t csh compatible
set sh=/bin/sh

" Just more convenient when shelling out a lot.
set autowrite
[download]

^* TODO

I'll update the above with your suggestions, starting with fixing the following issues:

1. Where to install this / how to have this loaded automatically? This should be loaded automatically when editing files with names matching \.(pl|m)|t$. Anyone remember how to do that?
   For now, I put this in ~/perltest.vim and do :so ~/perltest.vim
2. Make it local. Currently this overwrites errorformat, which is kinda lame if you're also doing development in another language. If the effect can be localized to this file mode, all the better.
3. ...?

See also

• .vimrc options to assist with perl coding
• Making testing life easier in vim in Ovid's journal
• Vim for Perl developers by Leonid Mamchenkov - nothing test related but full of other goodies.

ChangeLog

• 2005-03-01T19:48Z - Added lib and taint (Thanks dragonchild). v1.02.