Maybe I'm a bit dense, but when are asynchronous commands a pain point in an editor? I mean, you can run eg a script that forks into the background, right? I'm not sure I really want to do "r! long-running-thing-that-updates-buffer". I can see me wanting to do "! long-running-compile &" (in the background). And I can do that in vim?
One of the things that has caught me is syntax checking. I use the syntastic plugin, set to check syntax on write, and I apparently save my changes pretty frequently. Some files can take 2-3 seconds to run an external syntax checker, during which time I can't edit the file.
I guess the real problem is me saving too often. Others may be trying to run a long make from vim and wanting to continue editing or looking through files.
No, that sounds like a valid usecase (and/or a horribly slow syntax check -- I'm not familiar with syntactic... does it do some kind of heuristic grammar check?).
I think usually it just runs the compiler in a syntax-check mode. For instance, it runs gcc with -fsyntax-only. I think I have sometimes seen style warnings too, so maybe there is more than that. Maybe I could configure it better to be faster, but for now it doesn't bother me often enough.
Is this for c++? You might benefit from moving to cmake with the ninja backend (ninja being the important part not cmake) -- depending on what kind of projects etc etc.
