Powerline does not play nice with Tmux

Tmux has been an invaluable tool for me over the years. If you haven’t come across it before, Tmux is akin to a window manager for your terminal. It allows you to create multiple tabs, split windows into panes, and, most notably, keeps your remote sessions alive even after you disconnect.

I am also a fan of Powerline, the fancy status line for Vim, shell prompt and other applications. So, I naturally wanted to use it for my Tmux status line. But to my great surprise, it did not work as expected.

First of all, the Tmux plugin for saving sessions (tmux-continuum) has stopped working. It appears that Powerline overrides the hook placed in Tmux’s right status bar by tmux-continuum.

Moreover, I started seeing huge CPU spikes at random intervals, because Powerline was going crazy. It seems there is a bug in Powerline causing these issues.

Disappointed, I looked for an alternative and discovered tmux-powerline. It does exactly what I need without any adverse effects. I recommend giving it a try as well.