Plugin is currently in maintenance mode, no feature requests will be accepted. Vim-powerline will be deprecated in favour of https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline once it is ready.

Powerline is a utility plugin which allows you to create better-looking, more functional vim statuslines. See the screenshots below for a demonstration of the plugin's capabilities.

It's recommended that you install the plugin using Pathogen or Vundle. After the plugin is installed update your help tags and see :help Powerline for instructions on how to enable and configure the plugin.

See the Troubleshooting section below if you're having any issues with the plugin or the font patcher.

Note: You need a patched font to be able to use the symbols in the statusline. An experimental Python/fontforge-based font patcher is included in the fontpatcher directory. See fontpatcher/README.rst for usage instructions.

I can't see the fancy symbols, what's wrong?

Make sure that you have let g:Powerline_symbols = 'fancy' in your vimrc file. The settings may be loaded too late if you have this in gvimrc, so always put this in your vimrc.

Clear the cache using :PowerlineClearCache and restart vim.

Make sure that you've configured gvim or your terminal emulator to use a patched font.

Make sure that vim is compiled with the --with-features=big flag.

The fancy symbols look a bit blurry or "off"!

Make sure that you have patched all variants of your font (i.e. both the regular and the bold font files).

I'm unable to patch my font, what should I do?

Font patching is only known to work on most Linux and OS X machines. If you have followed the instructions in the fontpatcher README and still have problems, please submit an issue on GitHub.

You can download some community-contributed patched fonts from the Powerline wiki if you don't want to mess around with the font patcher.

The Syntastic/Fugitive statusline flags don't work!

These flags should work without any configuration. If you installed either plugin after Powerline, you'll have to clear the cache using :PowerlineClearCache and restart vim.

The colors are weird in the default OS X Terminal app!

The default OS X Terminal app is known to have some issues with the Powerline colors. Please use another terminal emulator. iTerm2 should work fine.

The arrows may have the wrong colors if you have changed the "minimum contrast" slider in the color tab of your OS X settings.

The statusline has strange characters like ^B in it!

Please add set encoding=utf-8 to your vimrc.

You may also need to set your LANG and LC_* environment variables to a UTF-8 locale (e.g. LANG=en_US.utf8). Consult your Linux distro's documentation for information about setting these variables correctly.

The statusline has a lot of ^ or underline characters in it!

You need to configure the fillchars setting to disable statusline fillchars (see :h fillchars for details). Add this to your vimrc to solve this issue:

set fillchars+=stl:\ ,stlnc:\

The statusline is hidden/only appears in split windows!

Make sure that you have set laststatus=2 in your vimrc.

I'm using tmux and Powerline looks like crap, what's wrong?

You need to tell tmux that it has 256-color capabilities. Add this to your .tmux.conf to solve this issue:

set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"

If you use iTerm2, make sure that you have enabled the setting 'Set locale variables automatically' in Profiles > Terminal > Environment.

If you have any other issues and you can't find the answer in the docs, please submit an issue on GitHub.