Powerline for vim and bash prompt

Powerline is very cool status line for vim and easy to setup. It also supports shell prompt. But Powerline-shell is better for shell prompt because it can suppor version control information.

Installing fonts

• Installing font on Mac
  1. Download font file form github

     wget https://github.com/powerline/powerline/raw/develop/font/PowerlineSymbols.otf
     

  2. Open Finder and double click the font file to open preview window
  3. Click button “Install Font” to install font to user folder
  4. Changing font for iTerm2 or Terminal (Preferences –> Profile –> Text –> Non-AsCII Font)
• Installing fonts on Windows
  1. Download font from Fantasque Sans Mono
  2. Unzip the font file and click all ttf font files to install
  3. Change font for Putty or other terminal tools

Installing Powerline-shell

• Clone powerline-shell repository and install it

  git clone git@github.com:banga/powerline-shell.git
  cd powerline-shell
  cp config.py.dist config.py
  vi config.py # edit it before running install.py. if it is changed later, you need run install.py again
  ./install.py
  

• Creating a powerline-shell.py link at home directory

  cd ~/
  ln -s ~/powerline-shell/powerline-shell.py # powerline-shell repository folder is ~/powerline-shell
  

• Editing .bashrc or .bash_profile or .profile and add the following lines

function _update_ps1() {
    PS1="$(~/powerline-shell.py --cwd-max-depth 3 --colorize-hostname $? 2> /dev/null)"
}

if [ "$TERM" != "linux" ]; then
    PROMPT_COMMAND="_update_ps1; $PROMPT_COMMAND"
fi

Installing Powerline for Vim

• Installing powerline

  pip install powerline-status #for python2
  pip3 install powerline-status #for python3
  

• Installing macvim (For Mac OS X only)

  brew install macvim --env-std --with-override-system-vim
  

• Checking python version supported by Vim. If no python, it won’t work for next step

  vim --version | grep +python
  

• Editing .vimrc and add the following lines

  # for python2
  python from powerline.vim import setup as powerline_setup
  python powerline_setup()
  python del powerline_setup
  

  or

  # for python3
  python3 from powerline.vim import setup as powerline_setup
  python3 powerline_setup()
  python3 del powerline_setup
  

Written on April 20, 2017