Make Syntastic close just the error window

Dave picture Dave · Sep 23, 2013 · Viewed 13.7k times · Source

I've got the (Mac)Vim Syntastic plugin installed via Janus. When I open the :Errors window to view the reason for syntax errors, it shrinks the file with the errors to one line and uses the rest of the real estate for the Errors window.

Is there a way to make it hog less room for errors and more importantly, how do I close just the Errors window? The usual :q closes both the Errors window AND the original file, even if the cursor is in the Errors window. (That's not 100% correct -- it gratefully does not close the file if the file hasn't yet been saved).

Answer

Ingo Karkat picture Ingo Karkat · Sep 23, 2013

Syntastic uses the location list (a window-local variant of the quickfix list), so a :lclose will close it, but keep the other buffers.

As per syntastic's help pages, the initial height can be configured:

:let g:syntastic_loc_list_height=5

But I suspect that your intrusive Janus distribution has a hand in that. Vim "distributions" like spf-13 and Janus lure you with a quick install and out of the box settings, but you pay the price with increased complexity (you need to understand both Vim's runtime loading scheme and the arbitrary conventions of the distribution) and inflexibility (the distribution may make some things easier, but other things very difficult). Vim is incredibly customizable, using someone else's customization makes no sense.