Dear Maintainer, Upon installing Powerline and successfully integrating it into Bash, I looked to the existing README.Debian and added the three suggested lines to my .vimrc. Vim launched but did not display the expected status line output. Instead, the default status line was displayed. I attempted to execute the python code from the README manually to attempt to collect debug information, and the Python interpreter crashed and indicated that it couldn't find the bindings for vim. Python was looking in various directories in dist-packages, but I then attempted to find any bindings in /usr/share/powerline/ where I had found the Bash bindings. The vim folder does not exist in this binary package or in the 2.8.3 build in testing. The files do exist in the source repository on Salsa. Was this not included because the default vim installation doesn't contain Python support? Is there an alternate package of Powerline which contains the vim bindings? Could they be enabled in the default package in a way which doesn't break anything for folks using vim.basic or vim.tiny while still allowing vim.nox and the other variants which contain Python support?
Hello Rob, I think the decision not to ship vim bindings happened before I was the maintainer of the package, but your suspicion is correct regarding Debian's vim not being built with python support. I don't think the bindings would work. What I use on my machines is vim-airline, which you can install using apt or pretty much any vim plugin manager. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/vim-airline https://github.com/vim-airline/vim-airline I don't think it can be enabled by default since vim-airline doesn't enable itself automatically. We could add vim-airline to powerline's Suggests, and mention somewhere that the bindings for vim are in that package (not sure where yet), but it's worth noting that they are two separate projects with their own codebase each (although they look pretty much the same). Thank you for reporting this,
Would it be possible to provide a new binary package, vim-powerline/powerline-vim or something similar, to provide the necessary bindings? This package would then depend on Vim versions that has Python support. If we don't do anything, I believe the description and the Enhances field in d/control should be updated, as it currently is misleading.
Ok, answering my own email after playing around with the package. It definitively is, using dh-sequence-vim-addon, powerline can be installed as a Vim plugin, just like the Debian packages vim-fugitive, vim-airline and vim-youcompleteme. It might need some work to not break current users setup. After finding and reading the README.Debian file in powerline, and following the extra steps, I got the plugin to work. The previous part is therefore wrong. In other words, the current description and Enhances fields is therefore correct.