Installing Powerline in Debian
Powerline is an awesome status bar that tells you additional information about various things in bash, vim, and tmux. It comes in handy and makes your terminal look sweet. It is a little bit of a PITA to install, but it is totally worth it. I got most of the way there with this very helpful Stack Overflow answer. But I ran into an issue with vim in Debian. I was getting an error telling me that vim needs to be compiled with python support in order for powerline to work. This seemed silly to me because you should not have to recompile vim in order to use this little plugin. Luckily the solution was easy. There are like 20 different vim packages in debian. The default vim package gives you a bare bones vim install. In order to take advantage of this plugin and other goodies you should install the vim-nox package. In order to install powerline in debian you should do the following. This will install everything system wide.
- Install pre requisites
sudo apt-get install vim-nox git python-pip
- Install Powerline
sudo pip install git+git://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline
- Install the required fonts
wget https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline/raw/develop/font/PowerlineSymbols.otf wget 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/
- Add the following to your \~/.vimrc
set rtp+=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/powerline/bindings/vim/ " Always show statusline set laststatus=2 " Use 256 colours (Use this setting only if your terminal supports 256 colours) set t_Co=256
- Add the following to your \~/.bashrc
if [ -f /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh ]; then source /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh fi
- Add the following to your \~/.tmux.conf
source /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/powerline/bindings/tmux/powerline.conf set-option -g default-terminal "screen-256color"
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- The Futzing Fraction from Deciphering Glyph
- Sit On Your Ass Web Development from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Issue 91 – GDP on the blockchain
The regulator set to take on primary crypto oversight is down to a single Commissioner, and new pro-crypto PACs focus on installing more Republicans in the midterms
via Citation Needed August 27, 2025V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London
We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture. First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year. This is a delightful new format for a mu…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 27, 2025Generated by openring