How to use vim airline or powerline on windows command promt?

Question

I am trying to use vim airline on windows 8(x86). I have managed to get it working in gvim 7.4 successfully.

How can I get the same look on vim running in command prompt?

What I can deduce from research is that cmd is not displaying unicode characters and even color is different ( I have set t_Co=256 on vimrc ). I have patched font installed and am currently using it on cmd (by adding it on registry).

cmd cannot display fancy glyphs, for example ⮀ is getting replaced by '>'.

I have even tried it on console2. What are possible option to get consistent look?

Answer 1

The problem is not with the vim, but with the capabilities of the cmd terminal. It doesn't support normal code sequences, and there are a lot of other problems.

But cmd can display unicode characters. Your problem lies probably elsewhere. Maybe your vim doesn't support it?

Vim uses a lot of complex control sequences, so it expets a lot from the underlying terminal emulator.

On my opinion, you had to switch to a terminal emulator capable to use all of the currently common control sequences. I searched a lot for that as well, I found mintty the best. It is part of the cygwin/mingwin distribution, but you can use from them independently, too.

Answer 2

The Vim running in the Windows console will be limited to 16 colors (and limited font attributes), no matter what you :set t_Co to.

Likewise, display of Unicode characters is difficult and depends on the correct codepage. One usually does chcp 65001 for a Unicode one, but that doesn't seem to work well with Vim.

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In the end, I see little reason to use the Windows console Vim when you have GVIM. On Unix, there's the issue that ssh'ing into a box is easier and more common than X forwarding, but you don't have that kind of remoting on Windows, anyway. Also, the Windows shell is much more crippled than bash / zsh / your favorite here, and Windows in general is far less oriented towards the command-line, so there's no benefit from launching Vim and other tools from the same shell continuously.

Answer 3

Closest I came to powerline like thing in Windows cmd is that:

https://github.com/hazardland/powerline.bat