I regret that the author mentioned Plan 9; this has prevented my usual smug post about how Plan 9 was doing this 20 years ago.
The plan9port plumber is not especially hard to work with; the main problem is teaching Unix programs to talk to it. I think you could use "xdotool" and "xclip" to feed into plumber in the same way, although then the problem becomes distributing just the plumber without all the other associated plan9port stuff.
Yeah, it has always irritated me that most modern IDE's require a plugin or a poor quality built in terminal to give simple 'jump to error location' messages. It is a lot of fun to have magic shortcuts in any window on the whole OS with minimal program specific code.
I have wanted this functionality on linux/BSD since I saw Russ Cox do it in acme on plan9(port), I just didn't really have the will power to pull in a whole OS userspace on top of my current one.
I use acme as my IDE because it is basically a tiling window manager. I keep an acme window open in my source directory, and type things like "go build ." there. If there's a problem in the code, the output goes to an Errors window and I can just right-click on the line numbers to go where I need to go. Because I have the plumber running, I can also right-click on URLs, image paths, etc to have them automatically open in the appropriate application (browser, image viewer, etc).
Of course, my colleagues think I'm insane because my editor encourages mouse use. I think they're insane because they bought a mouse but never use it :)
I use plan9’s plumber on Linux and bsd, with a simple st patch to plumb the selection with a right click.
The tricky part is to deal with relative paths.
Sending to an existing vim session, at path:line:col requires the « remote » features and some plugin.
This is very cool! There must be a way to do it on mac, too. Does anyone know the equivalent commands to grab the current window title, and grab the clipboard or currently highlighted text?
The plan9port plumber is not especially hard to work with; the main problem is teaching Unix programs to talk to it. I think you could use "xdotool" and "xclip" to feed into plumber in the same way, although then the problem becomes distributing just the plumber without all the other associated plan9port stuff.