New powerline goodies in Debian

About powerline

Powerline does some font substitutions that allow additional theming for terminal applications such as tmux, vim, zsh, bash and more. The powerline font has been packaged in Debian for a while now, and I’ve packaged two powerline themes for vim and zsh. They’re currently only in testing, but once my current todo list on packages look better, I’ll upload them to stretch-backports.

For vim, vim-airline

• Debian Package: vim-airline
• Available since: testing/buster
• Upstream website: https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline

vim-airline is different from previous vim powerline plugins in that it doesn’t depend om perl or python, it’s purely implemented in vim config files.

Demo

Here’s a gif from the upstream site, they also demo various themes on there that you can get in Debian by installing the vim-airlines-themes package.

How to enable

Install the vim-airline package, and add the following to your .vimrc file:

" Vim Airline theme
let g:airline_theme='powerlineish'
let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1
let laststatus=2

The vim-airline-themes package contains additional themes that can be defined in the snippet above.

For zsh, powerlevel9k

• Debian Package: zsh-theme-powerlevel9k
• Available since: testing/buster
• Upstream website: https://github.com/bhilburn/powerlevel9k

Demo

Here’s a gif from upstream that walks through some of its features. You can configure it to display all kinds of system metrics and also information about VCS status in your current directory.

Powerlevel9k has lots of options and features. If you’re interested in it, you should probably take a look at their readme file on GitHub for all the details.

How to enable

Install the zsh-theme-powerlevel9k package and add the following to your to your .zshrc file.

source /usr/share/powerlevel9k/powerlevel9k.zsh-theme