powerline

While tweaking my configs, including fleshing out my .tmux.config and fixing bugs in my .vimrc I ran an update on my vim plugins. That’s when I noticed something was horribly wrong. Powerline wasn’t working anymore. It was throwing an error about Python. Python? What the hell? I don’t remember it requiring Python…

Then I discovered that it’d been completely rewritten and a lot had changed.

It’s clearly still Alpha quality software, so it will (probably) improve rapidly, but in the meantime there’s a lot of hurdles to jump through in order to get it even sort of working. Maybe I can save you a little time.

The Basics

The new Powerline is useless without the below prerequisites, so make sure you install whichever ones you intend on using if you haven’t already, but there’s a few caveats you want to watch out for before you even really get to the point of making use of it.

UTF-8 Terminal Emulator

Okay let’s face it, if you’re on OSX, iTerm2 is amazing and you should be using it.

There’s been some fixes to custom codepoint font support in iTerm in the last couple of weeks so its best if you grab a nightly or compile it yourself if you’re feeling really masochistic.

I recommend downloading a precompiled nightly until a new stable is released.

Install it as usual, it probably won’t explode. But if it does, wait until the next iTerm nightly or grab an official release and mourn your utf symbols.

If you’re on Linux then iTerm isn’t an option (sadly), so install rxvt-unicode or terminator or whatever you want, just make sure it has solid utf support.

Vim

Vim needs to be compiled Python support, if you’re on OSX then MacVim has you covered already. You can install it with Homebrew and you’re good to go. On Linux you’ll have to select a package that supports it or compile it yourself. For instance Ubuntu I use vim-nox for non-gui and vim-gtk for gui support. The latter has better color support and since only has a library overhead of about 30MB it might be worth it to you to install anyway. If you’re on Gentoo make sure your USE flags have +python in the list.

Python (and the Powerline module)

You’ll need some sort of Python 2.7ish install (as far as I can tell), and you’ll need pip installed as well. The version that comes with Homebrew is good, but you’ll have to add a configuration option to your .vimrc if you do.

First install pip if you don’t have it already, and then you can install the Python module:

$ pip install https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/tarball/develop

Don’t even try to pip install powerline, the “powerline” package has nothing even slightly to do with this, its an unfortunate naming conflict.

Once that was done I had to add this to my .vimrc to get it to work:

python import sys; sys.path.append("/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/")

But on OSX you might find the package here instead:

python import sys; sys.path.append("/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages")

Finding Python’s site-packages

Your path might need to be different, if you can’t intuit it, you can have Python tell you where it hides its packages.

1. First ensure that Python can find it by seeing if powerline in the list of modules pip is aware of:

   $ pip freeze | grep powerline
   

2. If its there then you can open up a python repl and have it tell you where the file is at:

   import powerline
   powerline.__file__
   

Once you have that, you can figure out the path to the site-packages directory that you need.

Fonts

Part of Powerline’s aesthetic appeal comes partly from its custom UTF fonts. So you’ll need those to get it looking its best.

The codepoints have changed in the new version of Powerline. This means that your old fonts WILL NOT WORK. Seriously, don’t even try it. You’ll just end up hating yourself. In fact, you might as well remove all your old custom Powerline fonts, they’re pretty much useless now.

If you’re on OSX or Windows, you’ll have to download the new ones. They’re not all there yet unfortunately, but the good news is you can patch them yourself which I’m not even going to go into, you have fun with that.

If you’re on Linux, you might be in luck, try this bit of the install guide and you might never have to patch your fonts again!

Configuration

Okay that covers the install of the requirements (I think.. let me know if I missed one). The rest is pretty straight forward.

The official install guide will explain the rest to you, but I’ll put some of it here for posterity.

Vim

You just need to drop this line into your .vimrc and you’ll be off to the races:

python from powerline.ext.vim import source_plugin; source_plugin() If you figured out where your Python has installed Powerline at, and you can’t get Python to work in Vim, you can use the absolute path like this:

source {path}/powerline/ext/vim/source_plugin.vim

Help and Troubleshooting

• The official docs have different information.
• Search the open AND closed github issues, seriously, there is loads of good advice there.
• Ignore anything older than a month, since its probably about the old version of Powerline - and a completely different codebase.
• Use Google’s site search syntax like this: site:https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/issues to search powerline’s github issues.. yes I’m saying this twice, it was a big help to me.
• I never got the Python version of Powerline to work for Tmux yet (appears to be a bug in the weather widget).