@ Robert:

Why not just use Vim Airline with Vundle? Normally I just share my .vimrc file across multiple systems and Vundle do automatically take care of downloading the plugins and their contents.

# update
I too have wrote a detailed guide on installing and configuring Powerline and Airline:
reversiblean-reversiblean.rhcloud.com/install-vim-powerline

You should really check out vim-airline . It has almost all of the features of powerline, but is very small, starts up instantly and is very extensible. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and it’s great.

Or you can just use vim-airline.

I definitely agree with you that Powerline feels really heavyweight. One of the most important things for me in a statusline is an obvious way to tell if the buffer has been modified since the last save. I use Airline, which turns purple when I have unsaved modifications.

Lovely, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for (I could never get powerline to work nicely and consistently on multiple different OS’s so I gave up on it).

One very minor niggle – the ‘COL’ part of the cursor position section displays single digit columns as 0-9 instead of 00-09, which causes an annoying little visual distraction as the bottom right section shifts back and forth as you move around. Is there an easy way to fix this?

Thanks this is great! I was messing with powerline yesterday, and I came to the conclusion it’s probably better to just keep it native so I can eaisly move my vim config to other systems and have it look the same.

Perfect timing. My goodness could I not agree with you more regarding powerline. I was just going through your vim configuration post yesterday. Funny enough, the Obvious-Mode plugin on vim.org says it is depreciated in favor of powerline, and powerline on vim.org in turn says it is depreciated in favor of a beta python implementation on github. You can guess which plugin I naively opted for (and I was not happy with my time spent fucking with it). This is much better for me.

I agree…Powerline seems way too heavy! If tmux and my own custom statusbar for my window manager didn’t exist, then I’d consider it! My vim statusline is pretty stock, with the exception of adding git status from the vim-fugitive plugin (which I admit I _want_ to use more, but I rarely think about it since I normally have several terminals open in tmux already to take care of CLI stuff like git).

set statusline=%<%f\ %{fugitive#statusline()}\ %h%m%r%=%-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P

Scott