1. Installation of packages

Install the following packages as root,

# pkg install powerline-fonts
# pkg install py37-powerline-status

The powerline-fonts package contains patched fonts for special symbols that are not found in the regular fonts.

2. Start powerline at start

Add the following line to your shell's rc file, for my case, I am using zsh and so I add the following line to my zshrc file.

# rc file
. /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/powerline/bindings/zsh/powerline.zsh

This will invoke powerline when you open the terminal.

3. Getting patched font to use

You might need to consult your manual related to the specific terminal you are using. Firstly, the get the name of the patched fonts to use, you can do the following command,

# Get all fonts registered that are in powerline patched folders
$ fc-list | grep powerline

I like the Hack-Regular patched font so I am going to go with that.

4. Set up your terminal to use patched fonts

Personally, I am using xterm so this is what I have added to my .Xresources.

# .Xresources file
XTerm*faceName: Hack-Regular

5. Use Unicode for your FreeBSD

Before I came upon this step, I was having issue with the fonts in my terminal. As it turned out, after this step, my terminal is showing the powerline fonts properly.

If this file .login_conf do not exist on your home directory, have it created and add the following based on your locale.

To check all of your available locale, you can do the following.

locale -a | more

Make sure to pick something that have UTF-8 support, for my case I will be going with en_US.UTF-8. Set the lang accordingly to what you have picked.

me:\
 :charset=UTF-8:\
 :lang=en_US.UTF-8:

Done

Now save the file. You are ready to try the powerline. Make sure to logout and login back to try if the .login_conf is correctly loaded as well as your shell's rc file is loaded properly. Here is a screenshot of my powerline in my FreeBSD's xterm.