MacVim and Merlin suddenly misbehaving

Ecosystem
1

Since a few days I’ve noticed weird behavior: error messages get printed inline intermingled with the buffer contents.

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The (* E .. comments are (non-LSP) Merlin error messages which until now have appeared in the status window. They appear in the buffer but are not actually made part of the buffer.

I tried reverting recent .vimrc changes but that did not help. Has anyone experienced something similar?

2

This turned out to be no fault of Merlin at all. The ALE linting plugin for Vim apparently introduced a new virtual-text error highlighting mode which is on by default and produces these inline error messages. Too intrusive for OCaml type errors but maybe useful otherwise. Sorry for the noise.