Troubleshooting on OS X¶

I can’t see any fancy symbols, what’s wrong?¶

If you’re using iTerm2, please update to this revision or newer. Also make sure that Preferences>Profiles>Text>Non-ASCII Font is the same as your main Font.
You need to set your LANG and LC_* environment variables to a UTF-8 locale (e.g. LANG=en_US.utf8). Consult your Linux distro’s documentation for information about setting these variables correctly.

The colors look weird in the default OS X Terminal app!¶

The arrows may have the wrong colors if you have changed the “minimum contrast” slider in the color tab of your OS X settings.
The default OS X Terminal app is known to have some issues with the Powerline colors. Please use another terminal emulator. iTerm2 should work fine.

The colors look weird in iTerm2!¶

The arrows may have the wrong colors if you have changed the “minimum contrast” slider in the color tab of your OS X settings.
If you’re using transparency, check “Keep background colors opaque”.

Statusline is getting wrapped to the next line in iTerm2¶

Turn off “Treat ambigious-width characters as double width” in Preferences –> Text.
Alternative: remove fancy dividers (they suck in this case), set ambiwidth to 2.

I receive a `NameError` when trying to use Powerline with MacVim!¶

Please install MacVim using this command:
```
brew install macvim --env-std --override-system-vim
```
Then install Powerline locally with pip install --user, or by running these commands in the powerline directory:
```
./setup.py build
./setup.py install --user
```

I receive an `ImportError` when trying to use Powerline on OS X!¶

This is caused by an invalid sys.path when using system vim and system Python. Please try to select another Python distribution:
```
sudo port select python python27-apple
```
See issue #39 for a discussion and other possible solutions for this issue.

I receive “FSEventStreamStart: register_with_server: ERROR” with status_colors¶

This is a known libuv issue that happens if one is trying to watch too many files. It should be fixed in libuv-0.12. Until then it is suggested to either disable status_colors (from powerline.segments.common.vcs.branch()) or choose stat-based watcher (will have effectively the same effect as disabling status_colors).