Re: Customizing the mode line

[Justin Bogner]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:
>> The major and minor mode indicators are important.  For instance, there
>> must be a visible indicator of whether overwrite mode is on, because if
>> you toggle it frequently, you may forget whether it's currently on.
>
> Agreed, which is also why I'd rather shorten them down to maybe even
> a single char rather than eliminate them altogether.

There's a diminish.el on emacswiki that can do this (though you must
specify which minor modes you'd like to shorten). I recently started
using it to get rid of modes like filladapt and outline, that I enable
globally, and my modeline is now usually less than 80 characters wide.

I've also removed the padding in mode-line-buffer-identification:

    (setq-default mode-line-buffer-identification
                  (propertized-buffer-identification "%b"))

and shortened the display-time format. These days it's largely only gnus
buffers and git branches with long names that make my mode line too
long.