Making Powerline Work With Tmux And ZSH

After hearing good things about Powerline for a while, today I finally decided to install Powerline on tmux. However, it didn’t work when I followed the directions. Apparently, this is a common error.

To get it working, I placed the following in my ~/.tmux.conf, in addition to sourceing the powerline.conf:

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set -g status-right '#(.local/bin/powerline tmux right)'

Basically, tmux does not load the PATH variable in your .zshrc. Therefore, you have to specify the path that powerline is installed at in your ~/.tmux.conf.

If this does not work, you can also try this:

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tmux set -g status-right '#(/usr/local/share/python/powerline tmux right)'

This uses powerline if you installed it as root.

Source: an issue on the Github Powerline repository