vim-airline

Lean & mean statusline for vim that's light as air.

Rationale

There's already powerline, why yet another statusline?

• it's 100% vimscript; no python needed.
• it's small. i want the core plugin to be less than 200 lines as a rule (specifically adhering to the open/closed principle).
• despite the small size, it is fully featured and already integrates with: vim-bufferline, fugitive, unite, ctrlp, minibufexpl, gundo, undotree, nerdtree, tagbar, syntastic and lawrencium.
• 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.
• it's fully customizable; if you know a little statusline syntax you can tweak it to your needs.
• it's trivial to write colorschemes; for a minimal theme you need to edit 9 lines of colors. (please send pull requests if you create new themes!)

What about old powerline?

• the old version still works well, but since it's deprecated new features won't get added
• it uses different font codes, which makes it incompatible with other powerline bindings in the same terminal (e.g. bash, zsh, tmux, etc.)

Where did the name come from?

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!

Installation

This plugin follows the standard runtime path structure, and as such it can be installed with a variety of plugin managers:

• Pathogen
• git clone https://github.com/bling/vim-airline ~/.vim/bundle/vim-airline
• NeoBundle
• NeoBundle 'bling/vim-airline'
• Vundle
• Bundle 'bling/vim-airline'
• VAM
• call vam#ActivateAddons([ 'vim-airline' ])
• manual
• copy all of the files into your ~/.vim directory

Configuration

:help airline

Integrating with powerline fonts

For the nice looking powerline symbols to appear, you will need to install a patched font. Instructions can be found in the official powerline documentation. Prepatched fonts can be found in the powerline-fonts repository.

Finally, enable them in vim-airline by adding let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1 to your vimrc.

FAQ

Solutions to common problems can be found in the Wiki.

Screenshots

A full list of screenshots can be found in the Wiki.

Bugs

Tracking down bugs can take a very long time due to different configurations, versions, and operating systems. To ensure a timely response, please help me out by doing the following:

• reproduce it with this minivimrc repository to rule out any configuration conflicts.
• include your version of vim, including patches, and operating system (:version will contain this information).
• a link to your vimrc or a gist which shows how you configured the plugin(s)

Contributions

Contributions and pull requests are welcome. Please take note of the following guidelines:

• adhere to the existing style as much as possible; notably, 2 space indents and long-form keywords.
• keep the history clean! squash your branches before you submit a pull request. pull --rebase is your friend.
• this plugin got a lot more popular than i initially expected, if you make changes to the core, please test on as many versions of vim as possible.
• if you submit a theme, please create a screenshot so it can be added to the Wiki.

License

Distributed under the same terms as the Vim license. See :help license.