Is there any way to prevent the side bar from opening a file?

[christophe-dufour]

to reproduce it :

SPC -
SPC f
type a file name...
ENTER

VIM will look like this

[jhchabran]

Will have a look at it, this is commonly encountered by newcomers.

~~Your colours are wrong though, I suspect your terminal not being configured for 256 colors (at least) and using solarized dark without the theme.~~ Fixed, 256 colors were there but terminal color scheme wasn't set.

[jhchabran]

Had a look at it, couldn't find a snippet on google. I'll search again, I agree this is annoying.

Something could be done around the fact that NERDTree buffer is not modifiable and then use another window to open up the file.