How to disable linting in vim (no, it's not ALE)

Question

Recently, the vim built into my Mac has started to show me linting feedback visually whenever I save. This is annoying and I'd rather it not happen. (Previous 20 years of using vi/vim did not have this behavior.)

My web searching suggests perhaps it's ALE, so I tried to disable it with :ALEToggle, but vim replied with "E492: Not an editor command: ALEToggle." So I don't think it's ALE.

The gutter shows many instances of S> as the indicator of where linting feedback resides, and then highlights characters within those lines as points of concern. See examples in screenshot below.

What linter uses S> and how do I disable it globally, for all files? I don't need or want this feature.

The relevant parts of my ~/.exrc file are here. (Note that things like ^H had to be typed out, because trying to paste them here failed for obvious reasons.) There is a little more than this in my file, but everything not shown here I've tried commenting out and it doesn't help, so it's not the problem.

execute pathogen#infect()
set ai
set ts=4
syntax on
set expandtab
set nu
filetype indent off
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set smarttab
set hlsearch
set ignorecase
set t_Co=256
colorscheme wombat256mod
map ^H :nohlsearch<Enter>
set mouse=a
set relativenumber

Answer 1

It looks like you're getting style warnings from Syntastic.

Either you can remove the plugin by deleting ~/.vim/bundle/syntastic or you could try adding this to your Vim config:

let g:syntastic_mode_map = {"mode": "passive"}