Add support for Powerline

[dblarons]

Please add support for one of Emacs' most popular ports of powerline.

https://github.com/milkypostman/powerline

[sellout]

Hah – I just tried Powerline last week and thought, “yuck, Solarized needs to handle this better.”

[dblarons]

Here are some screenshots of Vim running on my Mac with the Solarized color scheme and "Inconsolata-dz for Powerline" font. It pains me to say it, but Vim has a nice look going.

Perhaps we can come close to this in Emacs? I'm no pro with Elisp, but I'd be happy to help out where possible. Where in the codebase would this patch be applied?

Normal Mode

Insert Mode

Visual Mode

[dhaley]

I've had good results with another mode-line customization package, smart-mode-line. It respects all of solarized faces with this setting:

(setq sml/theme 'respectful)

It even works toggling solarized light to dark.

https://github.com/Bruce-Connor/smart-mode-line

SML also looks more like emacs and less like vim, but the vim look is cool too.

[dhaley]

solarized light with SML

[arielschiavoni]

+1 to support for powerline :-)

[sellout]

Ok, I found three bugs in Powerline’s handling of faces and I plan to submit a PR for it:

1. when looking up colors, it doesn’t pay attention to face inheritance, so it may not get a color value;
2. it doesn’t pay attention to :inverse-video, so if a mode-line is inverted (like Solarized’s) Powerline will grab the foreground color by accident; and
3. when creating the XPM files for transitions, it doesn’t adjust for sRGB, so the colors are slightly off (at least, I think that’s what’s happening).

The first two seem pretty straightforward. I might just submit those first. I imagine the last one probably only affects Mac users, but I’m just guessing.

[sellout]

I see milkypostman/powerline#22 is the same issue. I have a fix for the first two points that I should get submitted today.

(As well as Solarized-friendly settings for the Powerline faces.)

[sellout]

Point 3 is covered by milkypostman/powerline#54, so I’ll commit some Solarized Powerline faces and consider this closed (but I am happy to take suggestions of other combinations for the Powerline display – not particularly excited with what I came up with, but at least everything is readable).

[sellout]

(But Powerline won’t look right yet unless you pull from git or wait for the next version to hit MELPA.)

[sellout]

Here is what Powerline looks like for me now, BTW:

The bottom mode-line is active, and I’m using UTF-8 separators (#x25ba / #x25c4) since XPM images on OS X don’t (yet?) handle the sRGB colorspace properly.