How to use vim-powerline plugin in PuTTY and Windows

Statusline displayed by vim-powerline

The vim-powerline plugin can be used to enable a statusline in Vim that is both beautiful and informative. Using it fully on Windows and especially for use with PuTTY has a few problems:

1. The Consolas font needs to be patched to view the fancy Unicode symbols in the statusline.
2. Visual mode string symbols are not downloaded properly from Github.
3. Mercurial symbol in Consolas, a lightning symbol, does not display for some reason.
4. Patched Consolas font name cannot be distinguished from the default Consolas in PuTTY.

I have forked the main vim-powerline repository and fixed these issues in it. These fixed files can be obtained here. Follow the instructions from my post on vim-powerline with this fork and you should be able to get the plugin running on Windows.

For PuTTY, remember to change the font for you SSH session to Powerline-Consolas and also ensure that the terminal can support 256 colors.

Tried with: PuTTY 0.62 and Windows 8 x64