Every so often I get the urge to change how Emacs looks. Ever since I finally fell to the dark side, my Emacs has stayed looking pretty much the same. I like how it looks, but I do keep having this urge to find a darker theme, and to also make things just a wee bit more minimal.

At one point I was very much about, and in favour of, having as much information as possible in the mode line. Eventually I realised I didn't use that much and tried to declutter somewhat, mostly cleaning up minor mode information with diminish. Even then though, I had this feeling that there was still more information in the mode line than I really needed.

So, just now, as an experiment, I've decided to start fairly clean. I've dropped powerline and instead decided to have a play with mood-line. Rather than use one of its pre-configured formats, I've had a go at rolling my own:

(setq mood-line-format
      (mood-line-defformat
       :left
       (((mood-line-segment-buffer-status) . " ")
        ((mood-line-segment-buffer-name) . " : ")
        (mood-line-segment-major-mode))
       :right
       (((mood-line-segment-vc) . "  ")
        (mood-line-segment-cursor-position))))

So far I'm really pleased with the result.

My GNU Emacs

For any given buffer the mode line display is now:

  • The status of the buffer
  • The name of the buffer
  • The major mode of the buffer
  • The git status for what I'm working on
  • The cursor position

Honestly, I'm struggling to think of anything else I really need to see. Sure, I can imagine there's the odd minor mode I might need to know about, but generally I either have them enabled all the time anyway, or it's something so obvious that I know when it's not enabled.

I'm going to run with this for a while now and see how I feel. I can sense that I might want to tweak a couple of things (at the moment the left-hand side will move when I change the unsaved status of the buffer; on the right there's nothing that tells me that this file I'm editing right now is new to the repo and not part of it yet), but this basic configuration feels clean and right.

Meanwhile... the search for a theme that is darker and I actually prefer over the sanityinc-tomorrow themes continues. I fear this is going to be a lot harder.