[jerf]

"IME linting picks up about 99% fluff (ooh look there's some whitespace on a blank line) and 1% potential issues highlighted (usually minor)."

What language are you using? Dynamic languages are fairly difficult to meaningfully lint because it's hard enough just to analyze a function for problems, let alone extend past that. Static languages are easier to write non-trivial linters for, because there's more information just sitting there in the source, waiting for something to grab it.

But even for dynamic languages, linters can still do things like enforce documentation standards, code testing/coverage standards, and some other basics that may sound trivial, but still add up to very useful things.

[spc476]

I find luacheck (a linter for Lua) invaluable for picking up typos, unused variables, variables shadowing other variables and unintentional global use (since Lua defaults to global by default). The types of checks seems mostly reasonable to me [1][2].

[1] http://luacheck.readthedocs.io/en/stable/warnings.html

[2] I'm not entirely happy with the formatting issues, but they can be easily disabled.

Edit: hit submit by mistake.