vim-airline

lean & mean statusline for vim that's light as air

rationale

there's already powerline, why yet another statusline?

• it's standard vimscript, no python needed
• it's small. i want the entire plugin to be less than 200 lines as a rule
• it gets you 90% of the way there; in addition to all the standard goodies, it integrates with vim-bufferline, fugitive, and syntastic
• it looks good with regular fonts, and provides configuration points so you can use unicode or powerline symbols
• it's fast to load, taking roughly 1ms. by comparison, powerline needs 60ms on the same machine.

what about old powerline?

• the old version still works well, but since its deprecated new features won't get added

why's it called airline?

i wrote the initial version on an airplane, and since it's light as air it turned out to be a good name. thanks for flying vim!

configuration

:help airline

prerequisites

for this plugin to work properly lazyredraw needs to be set. during development i had this on the entire time, and it turns out that this has a major impact in colors being able to change prompty (ironic that lazy == eager here). i'm still tracking down the cause and hopefully in the future this requirement can be removed.

faq/troubleshooting

1. the powerline font symbols are not showing up

• the older deprecated vim-powerline uses different codes compared to the newer powerline.
• you can grab prepatched fonts at powerline-fonts, or you can manually set the relevant g: variables

2. there is a pause when leaving insert mode

• you need to set ttimeoutlen to a low number; 50 is recommended

3. you get the error Unknown function: fugitive#head

• you are probably using version 1.2, which is very old...download v2 from the project page.

screenshots

regular font

powerline font

contributions

contributions and pull requests are welcome.

license

:h license