Vim: How to Install Airline?

I'm just getting started with Vim. It's a fun experience, but I've found it to be kind of overwhelming. I'm trying to get this plugin installed, vim-airline, but I'm having a lot of trouble. The Installation section on the Github page simply states:

copy all of the files into your ~/.vim directory

Presumably, this means download the .zip, extract it, and copy all of those files into ~/.vim/. I did this, but Vim just starts up like normal, and running :help airline just gives:

Sorry, no help for airline

I assume that this means it isn't getting installed. Also, the statusbar remains the same. I'm new to Vim and would really like to get this working. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I also tried putting the files into /usr/share/vim/vim73/. No dice.

EDIT 2: I ran :helptags ~/.vim/doc and now the help-page displays when I type :help airline, but I'm still not getting the plugin itself (the status bar). Vim looks the same, but it can now display the help page.

Check the project's FAQ.

vim-airline doesn't appear until I create a new split

Add set laststatus=2 to your vimrc.

Inside vim, do :h laststatus to understand why this is needed. If you want to know in the future if a plugin is being "loaded" or not, check :scriptnames.

I installed airline using install instructions from https://github.com/bling/vim-airline

They recommended several package managers - I picked the first one:

Pathogen

git clone https://github.com/bling/vim-airline ~/.vim/bundle/vim-airline

I got :help airline to work with this command:

:helptags ~/.vim/bundle/vim-airline/doc

Like you, now the help-page displays when I type :help airline.

When you download the latest version of vim-airline as .zip and unzip it to a temporary directory, you get a vim-airline-master directory in the temp directory. Inside vim-airline-master you'll find autoload, doc and plugin directories. You should either

• copy these three directories to your ~/.vim/ if they don't yet exist (don't overwrite existing directories with same names!) or
• copy the contents of the aforementioned three directories to existing directories under ~/.vim/

However, as a side note, I strongly suggest looking into Pathogen as I've found it the most trouble-free way to play with Vim plugins.

Those manual installation instructions assume a lot -- I would say they're just wrong. The plugin files should actually be copied into various subdirectories of your ~/.vim directory.

I downloaded the zip file from its Vim scripts page and took a look.

The doc/airline.txt file goes into your ~/.vim/doc subdirectory. The plugin/airline.vim file goes into your ~/.vim/plugin subdirectory. The autoload/airline.vim file goes into your ~/.vim/autoload directory as does the autoload/airline directory and all its contents.

This is one of those more complicated plugins that should probably be installed using a plugin manager, but I wouldn't worry about that until you get a little more experience with Vim.