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).
• it gets you 90% of the way there; in addition to all the standard goodies, it integrates with vim-bufferline, fugitive, unite, ctrlp 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.
• it's fully customizable; if you know a little statusline syntax you can tweak it to your needs.
• it is 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

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!

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'
• manual
• copy all of the files into your ~/.vim directory

configuration

:help airline

faq/troubleshooting

• 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
• there is a pause when leaving insert mode
• you need to set ttimeoutlen to a low number; 50 is recommended
• you don't see any colors
• the value of t_Co is likely misconfigured. please see this article.
• 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.
• airline doesn't appear until i create a new split
• add set laststatus=2 to your vimrc
• bufferline is printing to the statusline as well as the command bar
• you can disable automatic echoing by adding let g:bufferline_echo = 0 to your vimrc

bugs

if you encounter a bug, please reproduce it with this minivimrc repository i created and file an issue.

screenshots

dark theme with a regular font

dark theme with powerline symbols

simple theme

light theme

badwolf theme with bufferline integration

contributions

contributions and pull requests are welcome. please follow the existing coding style as much as possible.

license

:h license