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.

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!

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 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 the powerline font

simple theme

light theme

contributions

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

license

:h license