Troubleshooting¶
System-specific issues¶
- Linux
- OS X
- I can’t see any fancy symbols, what’s wrong?
- The colors look weird in the default OS X Terminal app!
- The colors look weird in iTerm2!
- Statusline is getting wrapped to the next line in iTerm2
- I receive a
NameError
when trying to use Powerline with MacVim! - I receive an
ImportError
when trying to use Powerline on OS X! - I receive “FSEventStreamStart: register_with_server: ERROR” with status_colors
Common issues¶
After an update something stopped working¶
Assuming powerline was working before update and stopped only after there are two possible explanations:
- You have more then one powerline installation (e.g.
pip
andVundle
installations) and you have updated only one. - Update brought some bug to powerline.
In the second case you, of course, should report the bug to powerline bug tracker. In the first you should make sure you either have only one powerline installation or you update all of them simultaneously (beware that in the second case you are not supported). To diagnose this problem you may do the following:
If this problem is observed within the shell make sure that
python -c 'import powerline; print (powerline.__file__)'
which should report something like
/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/powerline/__init__.pyc
(if powerline is installed system-wide) or/home/USER/.../powerline/__init__.pyc
(if powerline was cloned somewhere, e.g. in/home/USER/.vim/bundle/powerline
) reports the same location you use to source in your shell configuration: in first case it should be some location in/usr
(e.g./usr/share/zsh/site-contrib/powerline.zsh
), in the second it should be something like/home/USER/.../powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh
. If this is true it may be a powerline bug, but if locations do not match you should not report the bug until you observe it on configuration where locations do match.If this problem is observed specifically within bash make sure that you clean
$POWERLINE_COMMAND
and$PROMPT_COMMAND
environment variables on startup or, at least, that it was cleaned after update. While different$POWERLINE_COMMAND
variable should not cause any troubles most of time (and when it will cause troubles are rather trivial) spoiled$PROMPT_COMMAND
may lead to strange error messages or absense of exit code reporting.These are the sources which may keep outdated environment variables:
- Any command launched from any application inherits its environment unless
callee explicitly requests to use specific environment. So if you did
exec bash
after update it is rather unlikely to fix the problem. - More interesting: tmux is a client-server application, it keeps one
server instance per one user. You probably already knew that, but there is
an interesting consequence: once tmux server was started it inherits its
environment from the callee and keeps it forever (i.e. until server is
killed). This environment is then inherited by applications you start with
tmux new-session
. Easiest solution is to kill tmux withtmux kill-server
, but you may also usetmux set-environment -u
to unset offending variables. - Also check When using z powerline shows wrong number of jobs: though
this problem should not be seen after update only, it contains another
example of
$PROMPT_COMMAND
spoiling results.
- Any command launched from any application inherits its environment unless
callee explicitly requests to use specific environment. So if you did
If this problem is observed within the vim instance you should check out the output of the following Ex mode commands
python import powerline as pl ; print (pl.__file__) python3 import powerline as pl ; print (pl.__file__)
One (but not both) of them will most likely error out, this is OK. The same rules apply as in the 1), but in place of sourcing you should seek for the place where you modify runtimepath vim option. If you install powerline using VAM then no explicit modifications of runtimpath were performed in your vimrc (runtimepath is modified by VAM in this case), but powerline will be placed in
plugin_root_dir/powerline
where {plugin_root_dir} is stored in VAM settings dictionary: do echo g:vim_addon_manager.plugin_root_dir.
There is a hint if you want to place powerline repository somewhere, but still make powerline package importable anywhere: use
pip install --user --editable path/to/powerline
Shell issues¶
When sourcing shell bindings it complains about missing command or file¶
If you are using pip
based installation do not forget to add pip-specific
executable path to $PATH
environment variable. This path usually looks
something like $HOME/.local/bin
(linux) or
$HOME/Library/Python/{python_version}/bin
(OS X). One may check out where
powerline-config
script was installed by using pip show -f
powerline-status | grep powerline-config
(does not always work).
I am suffering bad lags before displaying shell prompt¶
To get rid of these lags there currently are two options:
- Run
powerline-daemon
. Powerline does not automatically start it for you. - Compile and install
libzpython
module that lives in https://bitbucket.org/ZyX_I/zpython. This variant is zsh-specific.
Prompt is spoiled after completing files in ksh¶
This is exactly why powerline has official mksh support, but not official ksh support. If you know the solution feel free to share it in powerline bug tracker.
When using z powerline shows wrong number of jobs¶
This happens because z is launching some jobs in
the background from $POWERLINE_COMMAND
and these jobs fail to finish before
powerline prompt is run.
Solution to this problem is simple: be sure that z.sh
is sourced
strictly after powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh
. This way background
jobs are spawned by z after powerline has done
its job.
When using shell I do not see powerline fancy characters¶
If your locale encoding is not unicode (any encoding that starts with “utf” or “ucs” will work, case is ignored) powerline falls back to ascii-only theme. You should set up your system to use unicode locale or forget about powerline fancy characters.
Urxvt unicode3 and frills¶
Make sure that, whatever urxvt package you’re installing, both the unicode3
and frills features are enabled at compile time. Run
urxvt --help 2>&1 | grep options:
to get a list of enabled options.
This should contain at least frills, unicode3 and optionally iso14755
if you want to input Unicode characters as well.
Compiler flags example:
–enable-frills –enable-unicode3
As long as your terminal emulator is compiled without unicode rendering, no amount of configuration will make it display unicode characters. They’re being considered ‘unnecessary features’, but they add negligible overhead to the size of the installed package (~100KB).
Vim issues¶
My vim statusline has strange characters like ^B
in it!¶
- Please add
set encoding=utf-8
to yourvimrc
.
My vim statusline has a lot of ^
or underline characters in it!¶
You need to configure the
fillchars
setting to disable statusline fillchars (see:h 'fillchars'
for details). Add this to yourvimrc
to solve this issue:set fillchars+=stl:\ ,stlnc:\
My vim statusline is not displayed completely and has too much spaces¶
- Be sure you have
ambiwidth
option set tosingle
. - Alternative: set ambiwidth to 2, remove fancy
dividers (they suck when
ambiwidth
is set to double).
Powerline loses color after editing vimrc¶
If your vimrc has something like
autocmd! BufWritePost ~/.vimrc :source ~/.vimrc
used to automatically source vimrc after saving it then you must add nested
after pattern (vimrc
in this case):
autocmd! BufWritePost ~/.vimrc nested :source ~/.vimrc
. Alternatively move :colorscheme
command out of the vimrc to the file which
will not be automatically resourced.
Observed problem is that when you use :colorscheme
command existing
highlighting groups are usually cleared, including those defined by powerline.
To workaround this issue powerline hooks Colorscheme
event, but when you
source vimrc with BufWritePost
(or any other) event, but without nested
this event is not launched. See also autocmd-nested Vim
documentation.
Powerline loses color after saving any file¶
It may be one of the incarnations of the above issue: specifically minibufexpl is known to trigger it. If you are using minibufexplorer you should set
let g:miniBufExplForceSyntaxEnable = 1
variable so that this issue is not triggered. Complete explanation:
- When MBE autocommand is executed it launches
:syntax enable
Vim command… - … which makes Vim source
syntax/syntax.vim
file … - … which in turn sources
syntax/synload.vim
… - … which executes
:colorscheme
command. Normally this command triggersColorscheme
event, but in the first point minibufexplorer did set up autocommands that missnested
attribute meaning that no events will be triggered when processing MBE events.
Note
This setting was introduced in version 6.3.1 of minibufexpl and removed in version 6.5.0 of its successor minibufexplorer. It is highly advised to use the latter because minibufexpl was last updated late in 2004.