goatslacker

Why vim-powerline wasn’t working properly with some of my files

Recently I’ve been using this vim plugin called vim-powerline which has plenty of nice features like

Which git branch you’re currently on
Filetype and encoding
Line number/Character
Changes color for Insert mode

I highly recommend it.

Anyways, vim-powerline wasn’t working properly on my laptop though. Some files like .gitignore would work whereas others like sample.coffee wouldn’t. If I removed my ~/.vim/ftdetect folder most files would work but that wasn’t the solution.

I finally narrowed it down to my custom syntax highlighting colour scheme mango.vim. The offending line was this:

highlight clear

After looking into it I found out that highlight clear was clearing all of vim-powerline's styles so for files where syntax highlighting was turned on, the plugin wasn’t working as expected.

So if you’re having difficulties installing vim-powerline, check to make sure your color scheme isn’t clearing highlights. Dark color schemes commonly have this set.

Installing vim-powerline is fairly easy. You’ll need to be on an 88 || 256 color terminal — so if you’re on OSX I definitely recommend iTerm2.

In your .vimrc file you’ll set the following