Install Powerline for Mac OS X

Powerline is a shell prompt and statusline plugin for vim, written in Python. It makes working with terminal much more fun and colorful. Here is an example of how the prompt looks like with Powerline.

As you can see from the screenshot, powerline gives you a colorful and visual attractive prompt. If you are in a git repository, it also tells you which branch you are currently working on. It also tells you the exit code of previous process (the number in the last red tab), etc. In this post, I'll show you how to install and setup powerline for Mac OS X bash shell and vim.

Update bash shell for Mac OS X

Apple releases software update quite often but, unfortunately, bash shell is never updated. The version of bash shell that comes with Max OS is quite old and lacks many features such as globing, exclude-dir when grepping, etc. If you need these features, you will need to update bash shell. First, check the version of your bash.

$ echo $BASH_VERSION
3.2.53(1)-release

$ which bash
/bin/bash