YouCompleteMe change gutter appearance

Question

I just installed YouCompleteMe with java completion

 ./install.py --java-completer

Looks like it does correction too:

I think the gutter looks really ugly though.

How can I hide the gutter all the time?

Is there a way for me to experiment with different styles for the gutter, e.g. putting coloured powerline arrows and having the grey background instead be the same as my vim background.

Answer 1

Vim 8 introduced the :help 'signcolumn' option. With it, you can unconditionally disable the sign column (the official name for the "gutter") with

:set signcolumn=no

To "style" the existing signs, you can obtain a list of them via :sign list. The (text and line) highlight groups can be changed via the :help :highlight command, just like for syntax highlighting. YouCompleteMe documents these for you. Some plugins also allow to influence the attributes via plugin configuration. If not, you can redefine the existing signs via :help :sign-define.