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
• enable them by adding let g:airline_powerline_fonts=1 to your ~/.vimrc
• 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
• all of the themes use a 256 terminal color palette. it's likely that the value of t_Co is misconfigured. please see this article on how to configure your terminal. pull requests for 8 and 16 color terminals are welcome.
• 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
• the statusline wraps
• you are probably using iTerm with double-width characters enabled. either disable this, or set ambiwidth=double in your vimrc.

bugs

if you encounter a bug, please reproduce it with this minivimrc repository i created and file an issue. please provide your operating system and vim version/patch level (can be found with :version). a reproducible gist would be hugely helpful.

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 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.

license

:h license