powerline/docs/source/overview.rst

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

Features
--------

* **Extensible and feature rich, written in Python.** Powerline was
  completely rewritten in Python to get rid of as much vimscript as
  possible. This has allowed much better extensibility, leaner and better
  config files, and a structured, object-oriented codebase with no mandatory
  third-party dependencies other than a Python interpreter.
* **Stable and testable code base.** Using Python has allowed unit testing
  of all the project code. The code is tested to work in Python 2.6+ and
  Python 3.
* **Support for prompts and statuslines in many applications.** Originally
  created exclusively for vim statuslines, the project has evolved to
  provide statuslines in tmux and several WMs, and prompts for shells like
  bash/zsh and other applications. It's simple to write renderers for any
  other applications that Powerline doesn't yet support.
* **Configuration and colorschemes written in JSON.** JSON is
  a standardized, simple and easy to use file format that allows for easy
  user configuration across all of Powerline's supported applications.
* **Fast and lightweight, with daemon support for even better performance.**
  Although the code base spans a couple of thousand lines of code with no
  goal of "less than X lines of code", the main focus is on good performance
  and as little code as possible while still providing a rich set of
  features. The new daemon also ensures that only one Python instance is
  launched for prompts and statuslines, which provides excellent
  performance.

*But I hate Python / I don't need shell prompts / this is just too much
hassle for me / what happened to the original vim-powerline project / …*

You should check out some of the Powerline derivatives. The most lightweight
and feature-rich alternative is currently Bailey Ling's `vim-airline
<https://github.com/bling/vim-airline>`_ project.

Screenshots
-----------

Vim statusline
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

**Mode-dependent highlighting**

* .. image:: _static/img/pl-mode-normal.png
     :alt: Normal mode
* .. image:: _static/img/pl-mode-insert.png
     :alt: Insert mode
* .. image:: _static/img/pl-mode-visual.png
     :alt: Visual mode
* .. image:: _static/img/pl-mode-replace.png
     :alt: Replace mode

**Automatic truncation of segments in small windows**

* .. image:: _static/img/pl-truncate1.png
     :alt: Truncation illustration
* .. image:: _static/img/pl-truncate2.png
     :alt: Truncation illustration
* .. image:: _static/img/pl-truncate3.png
     :alt: Truncation illustration