Question

Context

I’m using the NERDTree plugin.

The one thing that irks me is the visual vertical border between the NERDTree itself and my code. I find it slightly annoying to read my code. My current setup looks something like:

........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________
........................#________________________________________________

where the … = NERDTree, the _ = my actual code, and the ### = some vertical grey border.

Now, what I want is something like this:

........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________
........................#   ________________________________________________

The idea is that I somehow inject a 3 character border between the vertical divider of the NERDTre and the left of my actual code.

Now, I can almost achieve this via “set nu” — except instead of getting spaces, I get a bunch of numbers. I would like something like “set nub”, except instead of line numbers, I just get spaces.

Question:

How do I achieve the above?

Answer 1

You could use foldcolumn to create a gutter:

:set foldcolumn=3

If this adds fold markers to the gutter and you’re not using folds at all, then you can set foldmethod to manual so that no folds are created automatically:

:set foldmethod=manual