💡 [Update]: Over the past couple of years, I have gradually and fully transitioned to Neovim and its modern Lua plugin ecosystem (such as lualine.nvim). That said, I still maintain this classic Vim configuration as a reliable fallback/backup whenever I work on a remote machine or server where Neovim is not available.

(Original 2017 notes below)

Reason

vim-airline is an excellent Vim plugin which gives you a fancy status line and makes coding not that boring. However, recently I found it slowing down Vim’s start-up time.

I didn’t have this issue before, but now it takes at least 2 seconds to start a Vim session. I guess one reason may be that the /home directory is NFS-mounted and recently more people are using it.

I suspected the vim-airline plugin because Vim was freezing for 1s before the airline status bar showed up. After I disabled the plugin, Vim started up in almost no time. It might be too heavy.

Switch to lightline

However, I really like the fancy status bar. After searching, I found a very nice alternative - lightline.

Installation

Installation is very simple if you have a plugin manager like vundle or vim-plug. (BTW, I am using vim-plug now.) Just comment out the old one and add the new plugin.

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" Comment the Old
" Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
" Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'
" Add new plugin
Plug 'itchyny/lightline.vim'

Configuration

Actually, the default settings are good enough. I just did some simple configuration.

  • Change color scheme
  • Show git branch info (needs the vim-fugitive plugin)
  • Use powerline symbols
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let g:lightline = {
  \   'colorscheme': 'Dracula',
  \   'active': {
  \     'left':[ [ 'mode', 'paste' ],
  \              [ 'gitbranch', 'readonly', 'filename', 'modified' ]
  \     ]
  \   },
	\   'component': {
	\     'lineinfo': ' %3l:%-2v',
	\   },
  \   'component_function': {
  \     'gitbranch': 'fugitive#head',
  \   }
  \ }
let g:lightline.separator = {
	\   'left': '', 'right': ''
  \}
let g:lightline.subseparator = {
	\   'left': '', 'right': '' 
  \}
  • Show tabline and disable the GUI tabline
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let g:lightline.tabline = {
  \   'left': [ ['tabs'] ],
  \   'right': [ ['close'] ]
  \ }
set showtabline=2  " Show tabline
set guioptions-=e  " Don't use GUI tabline

Misc

I managed to show buffers on the tabline, but it gets too long when you open many files. So I used the vim-bufferline plugin instead.

Result

Vim’s start-up time is very fast now and I still have a fancy status bar. I am happy with it ^_^.

Update (2026-11-01): Noted transition to Neovim and modern Lua plugins, while retaining classic Vim setup as fallback.