Powerline on Archlinux

Powerline on Archlinux

I recently switched from GNU Screen to Tmux. While reviewing random tmux.confs on Github I stumbled onto the screenshot below of tmux & powerline.

Powerline is a statusline plugin for vim, and provides statuslines and prompts for several other applications, including zsh, bash, tmux, IPython, Awesome and Qtile.

https://github.com/gpakosz/.tmux

An AUR package available for Powerline. However for this document I am going to detail the standard installation.

Powerline Installation

Install python-pip (and if you don’t aleady have it, git):

$ sudo pacman -Sy python-pip git

Install Powerline:

$ su -c 'pip install git+git://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline'

Powerline is installed into: /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powerline

Powerline scripts for bash, tmux, fish etc are located in: /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powerline/bindings

Install the Powerline patched fonts:

$ wget https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/raw/develop/font/PowerlineSymbols.otf https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/raw/develop/font/10-powerline-symbols.conf
$ sudo mv PowerlineSymbols.otf /usr/share/fonts/
$ sudo fc-cache -vf
$ sudo mv 10-powerline-symbols.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Dotfile Configuration

Edit your various dotfiles to run their powershell configuration scripts.

~/.tmux.conf

source /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powerline/bindings/tmux/powerline.conf

~/.zshrc

if [[ -r /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh ]]; then
  source /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh
fi

~/.bashrc

if [ -f /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh ]; then
  source /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh
fi

Patched fonts are required on remote systems used to connect to your powerline/tmux box. Download and install a patched font for your system. https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline-fonts

Failure / Nothing works!

Should nothing above work as expected and/or you give up.

Uninstall Powerline:

$ su -c 'pip uninstall powerline'