Can't get "Syntastic" vim plugin to work

Question

I've installed Syntastic plugin in vim. I can't get it to work. I've tried :SyntasticEnable but no luck. SyntasticEnable python in my vimrc doesn't work either (in fact, it doesn't even parse the command, an error is shown when I try to add it to my .vimrc : Not an editor command: SyntasticEnable python).

How can I know what's going on? Syntastic isn't showing errors when I call it from vim. Does the first error (not and editor command in my .vimrc) indicates something I'm unaware of?

I have in my .vimrc:

set statusline+=%#warningmsg#
set statusline+=%{SyntasticStatuslineFlag()}
set statusline+=%*
let g:syntastic_enable_signs=1
let g:syntastic_auto_loc_list=1

I have a python.vim in ~/.vim/syntax_checkers as well. I can already use Pyflakes for python files, it works GREAT but I would like to have Syntastic functionality in other files/extensions I need when developing applications.

Answer 1

Is pyflakes on your environment path? If it is not, then you must add it to your path, or modify syntax\checkers\python.vim and add the full path to the binary. There are two lines you have to modify:

if !(executable("pyflakes"))

and also

let makeprg = 'pyflakes %'

---

In my case. I wanted Syntastic to work with PHP on my Windows machine. So I had to modify those two similar lines in php.vim to be:

let s:php_executable = "C:\\Uniserver\\usr\\local\\php\\php.exe"
if !(executable(s:php_executable))

and

let makeprg = php_executable . " -l %"

---

If your path contains spaces, you'll have to surround them in double quotes in the makeprg variable. Also with html.vim, the single quotes in makeprg must be replaced with double quotes, (you'll have to re-escape everything inside).

let s:libfolder = "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\GnuWin32\\bin\\"
let s:tidyexe = s:libfolder . "tidy.exe"
let s:grepexe = s:libfolder . "grep.exe"
if !executable(s:tidyexe) || !executable(s:grepexe)

and

let makeprg="\"".s:tidyexe."\" -e % 2>&1 \\| \"".s:grepexe."\" -v \"\<table\> lacks \\\"summary\\\" attribute\"" 

Answer 2

Have you tried to make sure Vim has the right value set for $PATH?

:echo $PATH

If not, try putting this in your .vimrc:

let $PATH=substitute(system("echo \$PATH"), "\r\*\n", "", "g")

Then shutdown and restart vim. If it works, you won't have to manually update the plugin's source files to manually include the path to the executables.

(found this via: https://superuser.com/questions/380535/getting-man-path-through-vim )