Configuring powerline for bash, vim, and tmux

My home machine is a Debian system with an Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. I run an XFCE desktop on it, with the XFCE Terminal hosting a tmux session I call éowyn. My shell is plain-old bash, and I use vim as my $EDITOR. Here are the steps that I ran to configure powerline in it.

Installation

Instead of tinkering with pip, we can take advantage of powerline already being packaged for Debian:

sudo apt install powerline

That's it! Really simple, and we avoid having to modify our $PATH in order to make powerline-daemon and powerline-config available.

Configuration

Now we can configure the three main applications that will use powerline: vim, bash, and tmux.

vim

The first thing is making sure that vim was built with Python support. Since this is the default Debian vim package, we should see something like this:

$ vim --version | grep +python
+conceal           +linebreak         +python3           +visualextra

Now, we add the following lines to .vimrc:

" Powerline configuration
python3 from powerline.vim import setup as powerline_setup
python3 powerline_setup()
python3 del powerline_setup
set laststatus=2

The last line makes sure that the powerline is present even with just one Vim window open.

bash

Add the following lines to .bashrc:

# Powerline prompt
powerline-daemon -q
POWERLINE_BASH_CONTINUATION=1
POWERLINE_BASH_SELECT=1
source /usr/share/powerline/bindings/bash/powerline.sh

tmux

Add the following lines to .tmux.conf:

# Set powerline
run-shell 'powerline-config tmux setup'

That's all that is needed to have a beautiful and consistent theme. I did not try to modify it or use another theme, because the out-of-the-box one already matches my XFCE colors pretty closely. Also, please note that I already have the FiraCode Nerd Font installed in this system.

An alternative

My work machine is a MacBook Pro. I tried to set up a beautiful terminal using iTerm2 and powerline, but I wasn't able to do it. I tried following the official instructions:

pip3 install --user powerline-status
# Add the directory inside ~/Library where powerline-daemon lives to $PATH

But I quicly ran into several issues. So, instead, this is what I have in my work machine (which, by the way, would also work fine in a Debian system):

• starship with a modified version of the Pastel Powerline preset.
• vim-airline with the minimalist theme.
• tmux-themepack with a modified version of the powerline/double/green theme.

So is three packages instead of one, but the configuration is easy, too.