tclint is a lint tool for Tcl. It analyzes Tcl source files and reports issues that may cause bugs, inhibit readability, or affect performance.

• Checks for common Tcl errors
• Companion formatting utility, tclfmt
• Usage checks for built-in commands
• Plugin system for usage checks of EDA tool-specific commands, including OpenROAD
• More coming soon!

Install tclint from PyPI using pipx (recommended):

pipx install tclint

Or with pip:

pip install tclint

Run tclint on a Tcl source file by providing its path as a positional argument:

tclint example.tcl

If the file contains any lint violations, they will be printed and tclint will return a non-zero exit code. Otherwise, the output will be empty and tclint will exit successfully.

$ cat example.tcl
if { [expr {$input > 10}] } {
  puts $input is greater than 10!
}
$ tclint example.tcl
data/example.tcl:1:6: unnecessary command substitution within expression [redundant-expr]
data/example.tcl:2:3: too many args for puts: got 5, expected no more than 3 [command-args]

tclint is a command-line utility. It takes a list of paths as positional arguments, which may either be direct paths to source files, or directories which will be recursively searched for files ending in .tcl, .sdc, .xdc, or .upf.

Collected files will be checked for lint violations. See the Violations documentation page for a description of all lint violations tclint may report.

Aspects of tclint's behavior can be controlled by a configuration file. By default, tclint will look for a file named tclint.toml or .tclint in the current working directory (in that order), but a path to an alternate configuration file can be provided using the -c or --config flag. See Configuration for documentation on the configuration file.

tclint includes a plugin system for checking EDA tool-specific commands. See the Plugins documentation page for more info.

tclint welcomes community contributions. The best way to help the project is to open an issue if you find a bug or have a feature request.

PRs are also welcome, but for non-trivial changes please open an issue first to solicit feedback. This helps avoid wasted effort.

Use the following steps to set up tclint for local development:

$ git clone https://github.com/nmoroze/tclint.git # or URL to fork
$ cd tclint
$ pip install -e .[dev]

Please format, lint, and run tests before submitting changes:

$ black --preview .
$ ./util/pre-commit

This project is copyright 2024 Noah Moroze, released under the MIT license.