mini-modeline

Allows to display mode line information in minibuffer.

Install

Using Melpa

Using Quelpa

Example:

;; I'm activating mini-modeline after smart-mode-line
(use-package mini-modeline
  :quelpa (mini-modeline :repo "kiennq/emacs-mini-modeline" :fetcher github)
  :after smart-mode-line
  :config
  (mini-modeline-mode t))

Manually

Just clone this repo and put it in your load-path.

Usage

mini-modeline comes with a global minor-mode mini-modeline-mode. You can toggle it by M-x mini-modeline-mode.

Features

1. Display mode line in minibuffer. By default you can set anything that compatible with mode-line-format, even your current mode line and it will be nicely kept in minibuffer.

2. Support left/right align display. You can set left side and right side part of mini-modeline separately. Just assign a mode-line-format compatible list to either mini-modeline-l-format or mini-modeline-r-format, and it will be left/right aligned accordingly.

3. Support multiple lines display in minibuffer

Important variables

You can customize those variable for better experiences.

1. mini-modeline-l-format Left part of mini-modeline, same format with mode-line-format.

2. mini-modeline-r-format Right part of mini-modeline, same format with mode-line-format.

3. mini-modeline-face-attr Plist of face attribute/value pair for mini-modeline.

4. mini-modeline-enhance-visual Enhance minibuffer and window's visibility. This will enable window-divider-mode since without the mode line, two continuous windows are nearly indistinguishable.

5. mini-modeline-echo-duration Duration to keep display echo. mini-modeline will display the message which has been echoed to echo area as part of mode line. Those echo will be automatically clear after this interval. Check out the gif to see it in action.

6. mini-modeline-update-interval The minimum interval to update mini-modeline. If you found mini-modeline is being updated to frequently, you can customize this variable.

7. mini-modeline-frame Frame to display mini-modeline on. nil means current selected frame.

8. mini-modeline-truncate-p Truncates the mini-modeline to fit in one line.

9. mini-modeline-right-padding Padding to use in the right side. Set this to the minimal value that doesn't cause truncation.

10. mini-modeline-display-gui-line Display thin line at the bottom of each window.

Why?

Echo area or minibuffer which reside in it is a big waste most of the time. It's empty (mostly) and unnecessarily consume an additional line of your editor. Look at VsCode, it has only one line at the bottom to display the status, even more, its message can even be nicely integrated into the status line. That's the sleek UI that I want for my editor.

At first, I've tried to hide minibuffer and only raise it when needed. Those efforts not bode well, even when the minibuffer is displayed in separate frame, it still has title bar, which is ugly since the minibuffer is just one line. Trying to display minibuffer in mini frame is not working well too. Well, I've never succeeded at that.

Then, finally another idea comes, if I cannot hide the minibuffer, I can just hide the mode-line, and display its information in minibuffer instead. Hence that why this package is born.