I love how easy pathogen (https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen) makes installing vim plugins from github. I always struggled with it in the past (and mostly avoided it) but now it is as simple as git clone and done.
Vundle is even better than Pathogen IMO. It takes away the need to manage git submodules, in favor of just creating a text file that defines your plugins, Bundler style. Removing plugins from your setup is MUCH cleaner.
Also, Vundle has a nice interface to manage installation/removal of new plugins (BundleSearch, BundleInstall, BundleClean, etc.). Pathogen is more of a 'do it yourself' approach, while Vundle tries to be a complete suite a la Aptitude.
And to be fair to tpope, Vundle is something that clearly came along later, looking to refine the experience that Pathogen established.
Vundle is a minor but very welcome improvement on Pathogen, while Pathogen was a monsterous improvement on the painful Vim plugin management of before.
I too am a big fan of tpope Vim plugins, and Vundle is the first plugin that I've ever used to replace one of his with. So now I don't have Pathogen but I have a Vundle file that says "tpope" all over it. :)
It seems like the current Vundle version does not play well with .vimrc under version control. That’s why I like Pathogen more, since I can simply insert the bundles as Git submodules into .vim/bundle. (Submodule support for Vundle is already on the way, there are some pull requests on GitHub.)
If you've tried this on Snow Leopard and are confused as to why it looks nothing like the screenshots, you might want to try a different terminal application.
Terminal in Snow Leopard doesn't support 256 colours, so iTerm2 should show vim-powerline closer to the screenshots. It's open source and works pretty well in my experience.
I love this plugin, man I spent so much time configuring my colorscheme and my status line to know in which window I am currently on. I like that is written in full VimScript too.
I too appreciate "native" plugins. I've even recompiled vim without support for Python, Ruby and Perl in an attempt to speed up startup (it starts a "great deal" faster, if I remember my tests correctly).
I've been using this for a few weeks, and really love it. It is definitely worth patching your vim font (although not very well documented).
You can use `:set guifont` in gvim to determine your font. Then, just run the included fontpatcher python script on the correct font to add the new symbols. Note that this script requires installing the fontforge python package (python-fontforge on ubuntu). Then tell gvim to use the patched font with `:set guifont=<fontname>`.
Agreed, this is a really great plugin. I love how I can see which mode (normal/insert/etc) I'm in by the statusbar color change. The color change is strong enough that I can see it in my peripheral vision, and don't ever have to take my eyes off of the code.
I'm so used to pathogen now that I almost forgot how much a mess installing vim plugins used to be. Really seems like there's been a plugin renaissance in the last couple of years.
The docs say that this will work best on a unix like system but doesn't say what that means or whether it will work on Windows. Has anyone tried this on Windows? Does it work?
It does work on Windows. Kinda. I'm using Consolas, and simple mode has a little question-mark-in-a-box where some dividers should be. Unicode mode is worse. Absolutely usable, though.
It'll take more fiddling than it's worth to patch the font on Windows, so I plan on booting Ubuntu to do it later.
I can't get it working on Windows. The Consolas patched font looks ugly and it does not show the fancy glyphs.
Even using Menlo, Inconsolata or Mensch version posted here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3457785 the glyphs does not show as on the screenshots on the vim-powerline readme.
Sad :)
The hinting/subpixel-shading/whatever on Menlo and Mensch looks awful on Windows Vista, although they do provide the proper symbols. After patching Consola, I got the same awful look and no symbols, even with `let g:Powerline_symbols="fancy" set and c:\tmp\Powerline.cache deleted before running the first time.
Edit 2:
The symbols _did_ work on Menlo and Mensch yesterday. Today they do not, even with setting the font and g:Power_linesymbols in _vimrc and deleting the cache file and restarting the editor. There's something odd going on.
After deleting the Powerline.cache file, I now have the '€' symbol and ',' instead of the arrows I think.
Using the Inconsolata that can be found upper in the comments or Menlo does not help.
It's still very usable and useful ;)
I'm trying to patch the Consolas font on Windows 7 using Cygwin, installing a bunch of dependencies for it.
I will try to host it somewhere if I succeed and if no one did it until then :)
I've uploaded patched versions of Menlo and Mensch here if you don't want to bother doing it yourself.
https://gist.github.com/1595572