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
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

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.