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. Also make sure that Preferences>Profiles>Text>Non-ASCII Font is the same as your main Font.

  • 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.

  • If you’re using transparency, check “Keep background colors opaque”.

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.

I receive “FSEventStreamStart: register_with_server: ERROR” with status_colors

This is a known libuv issue that happens if one is trying to watch too many files. It should be fixed in libuv-0.12. Until then it is suggested to either disable status_colors (from powerline.segments.common.vcs.branch()) or choose stat-based watcher (will have effectively the same effect as disabling status_colors).