Question

I scoured Google and SO for an answer but really couldn’t find one, probably because I don’t know the real name of these things.

annoying gutter

These gutters indicate nesting levels and folding options with little pluses and minuses and are completely useless to me, and take up a lot of spaces especially when working in split viewports.

Do you know how to get rid of them?

FYI I’m using the Janus distribution

Answer 1

That “gutter” is the fold column. You can turn it off via

:set foldcolumn=0

However, this usually is set by a plugin or a filetype plugin, so it will probably reoccur. You can find out who did this via

:verbose set foldcolumn?

If it’s been set up by a filetype plugin foo, you can put the command to turn it off into .vim/after/ftplugin/foo.vim. If it’s a plugin, read up on its documentation. (That’s the downside of pre-made Vim distributions like Janus!)