Cursor jump in Vim after save

Question

I started to experience a strange behavior in Vim - when saving a file (:w) the cursor jumps to a specific location in a file. The location is constant and is different for different files, that is, it can be a beginning of a function etc, but if I move the line up or down, the location after save remains.

My .vimrc is quite long, and for now I tried only :noautocmd command.

How can I fix or debug this?

Maybe you (or a plugin) remapped :w. What does ":cmap w" give you? — Arjen Dijkstra, Feb 14 '16 at 10:19
I found the cause. I checked :copen, which was empty. Then in :lopen I saw that there's a list from syntastic. And the position where the cursor jumps is the first location in that list! Now only remains to see how to fix that :) — valk, Feb 14 '16 at 13:25
Maybe it has something to do with the sysntastic settings: https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic#3-recommended-settings — Arjen Dijkstra, Feb 14 '16 at 13:28

score 22 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

I have had the same issue, not due to syntastic_auto_jump setting, but due to a command I had placed for trailing whitespace:

autocmd FileType * autocmd BufWritePre <buffer> :%s/\s\+$//e

This was moving the cursor to the last line that whitespace was being replaced. Essentially, any sort of command making changes to the document and changing the cursor without restoring it might cause similar behavior.

P.S.: The trailing whitespace can be fixed either by using a function that restores the cursor, like the following (taken from here)

function! <SID>StripTrailingWhitespaces()
    let l = line(".")
    let c = col(".")
    %s/\s\+$//e
    call cursor(l, c)
endfun

autocmd BufWritePre * :call <SID>StripTrailingWhitespaces()

or using a plugin that replaces trailing whitespaces and restores the cursor for you

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 15 '21 at 17:29

From the syntastic's docs:

When set to 0 the cursor won't jump automatically. (let g:syntastic_auto_jump = 0)

When set to 1 the cursor will always jump to the first issue detected, regardless of type. (let g:syntastic_auto_jump = 1)

When set to 2 the cursor will jump to the first issue detected, but only if this issue is an error. (let g:syntastic_auto_jump = 2)

When set to 3 the cursor will jump to the first error detected, if any. If all issues detected are warnings, the cursor won't jump. (let g:syntastic_auto_jump = 3)

So adding

let g:syntastic_auto_jump = 0

has solved the problem. Not clear why the problem suddenly appeared, but here's the fix for whoever needs it.

Cursor jump in Vim after save

2 Answers2