I recently replaced my vim-powerline with vim-airline. I like vim-airline so much that I can't help spreading words about it.

For those who don't know what vim-powerline is. It is a Vim plugin that can make the statusline of Vim colorful and eye candy. When vim-powerline first came out, it caught on very quickly. The author of vim-powerline even re-wrote it in Python (the project powerline) to make it work for more applications (zsh, Tmux, ipython to name a few). But the current problems are

1. vim-powerline is deprecated. No feature is added. To support other plugins, extra work needs to be done (see linepower)

2. powerline is too heavy for Vim users who believe less is more. Its dependency in Python complicated the installation and uninstallation. I've never set it up successfully. Most importantly, it is unstable. Many issues are open.

I really appreciate the hard work done by the author of vim-powerline. If vim-airline didn't appear, I would continue to use this plugin.

Comparing with the former two, vim-airline is lightweight, vimscript-only and actively maintained. It supports many plugins and the number is increasing. I did a very rough statistics on lines of code:

vim-airline:   935 lines
vim-powerline: 2638 lines
powerline:     11067 lines

It is impressive that vim-airline uses less than half the code of vim-powerline and all the features are covered. Here is my settings in .vimrc

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
" airline
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
let g:airline_theme             = 'powerlineish'
let g:airline_enable_branch     = 1
let g:airline_enable_syntastic  = 1

" vim-powerline symbols
let g:airline_left_sep          = '⮀'
let g:airline_left_alt_sep      = '⮁'
let g:airline_right_sep         = '⮂'
let g:airline_right_alt_sep     = '⮃'
let g:airline_branch_prefix     = '⭠'
let g:airline_readonly_symbol   = '⭤'
let g:airline_linecolumn_prefix = '⭡'

To view the unicode glyphs correctly, please use the font patched by fontpatcher in the github repo of vim-powerline (NOT POWERLINE).

Another tip. If you start Vim but the statusline is blank like this You may check in your .vimrc if you

set lazyredraw

Comment it. You will see

I strongly recommend this great plugin.