Installing and using syntastic.

Syntastic will alert you to syntax errors before compilation or running the code, saving you time. No, you don’t need to use an IDE for syntax correction!

I used vundle to install it in one command. Then edit your vimrc according to their instructions, so that it has newbie setup (which worked for me):

set statusline+=%#warningmsg#
set statusline+=%{SyntasticStatuslineFlag()}
set statusline+=%*

let g:syntastic_always_populate_loc_list = 1
let g:syntastic_auto_loc_list = 1
let g:syntastic_check_on_open = 1
let g:syntastic_check_on_wq = 0

After that, things worked perfectly.

This will also enable it to use it’s built-in syntax checkers. There’s information on its page about how to add additional checkers.

Later troubleshooting

Missing C++ headers.

I encountered an issue with syntastic flagging missing C++ headers that were actually in another directory. This turned out to be fixable with adding

let g:syntastic_c_include_dirs = [ '../include', 'include' ]

to my .vimrc, which tells Vundle to look there for headers.

This only works if you are willing to list out all the header locations, which I quickly found to be annoying as hell. When you get to that point,

let g:syntastic_c_remove_include_errors=1

Python version control.

Another fixable issue was updating the python syntax to python3. I had to to a pip3 install --user pyflakes and then set

let g:syntastic_python_checkers = ['pyflakes']

It’s also possible to define functions to switch this as needed.