Powerline
Powerline is a statusline plugin for Vim, and provides statuslines and prompts for several other applications, including zsh, bash, tmux, IPython, Awesome, i3 and Qtile.
Contents
Installation
Powerline can be installed in multiple ways, depending on preference and/or usage intent.
Official repositories
Install powerline and powerline-fonts from the official repositories
Using python-pip
- Install python-pip from the official repositories
- Please refer to the Powerline installation guide for additional python-pip instructions
Using a vim plugin manager
There are many vim plugin managers available which are able to install and update Powerline, assuming you are using a version of vim with Python support or you install python. For example, using vim-plugAUR from the AUR, add the following to your vimrc file:
~/.vimrc
call plug#begin('path/to/vim/plugins/directory') Plug 'powerline/powerline' call plug#end()
Substitute path/to/vim/plugins/directory
with the actual directory, such as ~/.vim/plugged
, or ~/.local/share/nvim/plugged
for Neovim, and run the vim-plug command :PlugInstall
within vim. This will download Powerline from the Powerline GitHub page to the specified plugin directory and add it to vim.
Fonts
Powerline uses special glyphs and symbols that will not appear correctly unless they are added to fontconfig or patched fonts are installed and used. The fontconfig and some patched fonts are available in the powerline-fonts package from the official repositories. A reduced set of fonts for the text console are available in powerline-console-fontsAUR.
Airline-vim alternative
There is currently one known alternative to Powerline - Vim-airline. It is a part of vim-plugins and can be installed separately as vim-airline. Optionally, install vim-airline-themes.
Special plugins
Depending on where you want to use Powerline, you might need to install additional packages.
After installing the package, you may need to add let g:powerline_pycmd="py3"
or let g:powerline_pycmd="py"
to your vimrc if you have more than one version of python installed.
:set laststatus=2
/usr/share/vim/vimfiles/plugin
, which vim is configured to check by default, meaning this will install Powerline in vim for all users and may require additional configuration. If this is not intended, consider either using a vim plugin manager, or installing the powerline package and adding set rtp+=/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/powerline/bindings/vim
to your vimrc.Usage
Bash
After installing powerline and powerline-fonts. Add the following to your ~/.bashrc:
powerline-daemon -q POWERLINE_BASH_CONTINUATION=1 POWERLINE_BASH_SELECT=1 . /usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh
Close and reopen your terminal and it should be working. If not, check the Powerline bash prompt usage instructions to ensure that it has not changed.
Other plugins
For detailed usage instructions, such as configuring your system to use Powerline with other shells, window manager widgets, etc., please refer to the Usage section of the Powerline documentation.