Troubleshooting on OS X

I can’t see any fancy symbols, what’s wrong?

  • If you’re using iTerm2, please update to this revision or newer.
  • You need to set your LANG and LC_* environment variables to a UTF-8 locale (e.g. LANG=en_US.utf8). Consult your Linux distro’s documentation for information about setting these variables correctly.

The colors look weird in the default OS X Terminal app!

  • The arrows may have the wrong colors if you have changed the “minimum contrast” slider in the color tab of your OS X settings.
  • The default OS X Terminal app is known to have some issues with the Powerline colors. Please use another terminal emulator. iTerm2 should work fine.

The colors look weird in iTerm2!

  • The arrows may have the wrong colors if you have changed the “minimum contrast” slider in the color tab of your OS X settings.
  • Please disable background transparency to resolve this issue.

Statusline is getting wrapped to the next line in iTerm2

  • Turn off “Treat ambigious-width characters as double width” in Preferences –> Text.
  • Alternative: remove fancy dividers (they suck in this case), set ambiwidth to 2.

I receive a NameError when trying to use Powerline with MacVim!

  • Please install MacVim using this command:

    brew install macvim --env-std --override-system-vim
    

    Then install Powerline locally with pip install --user, or by running these commands in the powerline directory:

    ./setup.py build
    ./setup.py install --user
    

I receive an ImportError when trying to use Powerline on OS X!

  • This is caused by an invalid sys.path when using system vim and system Python. Please try to select another Python distribution:

    sudo port select python python27-apple
    
  • See issue #39 for a discussion and other possible solutions for this issue.