Signs are not shown correctly

[cartoonist]

I have came across with this problem recently. The signs are not displayed correctly. This snapshot shows a file (right pane) compared to its HEAD version (left pane):

As you see, the first line is not annotated by ~ sign although it is detected as a hunk (for example during navigation by [c or ]c). This is just an example. I am facing other similar issues; e.g. missing +s.

[airblade]

What commit of the plugin are you using? Nvim or Vim?

[cartoonist]

I am using last commit in master branch and Vim 8.0.

[airblade]

I have occasionally experienced a hunk missing a sign while the hunk navigation still works. I've never been able to reproduce it reliably though and I'm not sure what the cause might be.

Next time it happens, please could you show the result of :echo getbufvar('', 'gitgutter')?

[cartoonist]

Yes, sure.

[cartoonist]

It seems that these two lines in my ~/.vimrc are responsible for hiding the sign of the first line:

autocmd BufEnter * sign define dummy
autocmd BufEnter * execute 'sign place 9999 line=1 name=dummy buffer=' . bufnr('')

I added these two lines to always show the sign column. When I commented those out, it works fine.

[airblade]

Aha, that makes sense.

You could try placing your dummy sign at line 9999, the same line as gitgutter, and also make sure you don't tell gitgutter to always show the sign column.

It's one of the strange things about Vim's signs – the line number for a sign doesn't need to exist.

[cartoonist]

Excuse me, I do not know much about vim signs. You mean I should change line=1 to line=9999? By changing the line number from 1 to 9999 the problem would just transfer from line 1 to 9999. It hides the sign for line 9999 instead of the first line.
And how can I tell gitgutter not to always show the sign column?

[airblade]

Yes, I mean change line=1 to line=9999, assuming you don't have any files with 9999 lines.

By not telling gitgutter to show the sign column, I meant don't add let g:gitgutter_sign_column_always=1 to your vimrc.

But I just checked and as of Vim 7.4.2201 you don't need to do this because it's built into Vim. You can just do this instead: set signcolumn=yes.

[cartoonist]

Thanks a lot. I did not know about set signcolumn=yes. That does what I want.

[airblade]

Great!