Choose what Python linters are used for Syntastic plugin in Vim

Preface

For a long time I’ve been annoyed with too many lint errors in my Python files coming from syntastic. Time to get this cleaned up.

Selecting active linters

Synastic has a plugin loader system that tries to enable all registered linters that are present on your system. For me, this means that when I have the binaries flake8, pylint and pep8 available on my PATH, Syntastic tries to run all of them.

You can find a list of all the linter it looks for under syntastic/syntax_checkers/python.

Now, you can open a Python file containing various errors and try out all the linters to see what fits you best. Toggle selected linters at a time by using the below line:

let g:syntastic_python_checkers=['<plugin name>']

Now you can trigger a relint of the document

:SyntasticCheck

I found that for myself, I prefer to only run flake8 for now. It makes it simple for me to configure it on a per-project basis using .flake8 files. That leaves me with this config:

let g:syntastic_python_checkers=['flake8']

References

• https://github.com/vim-syntastic/syntastic
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/23105873/90674