Tabs and ribbons for the mode line

This package provides utilities for displaying elements of the mode line as tabs and ribbons. It also provides replacements for a few built-in elements.

Configuration

Replacing default elements

To style the buffer identification, displayed in the mode line, as shown in the above screenshot, add the following to your init file.

(require 'moody)
(moody-replace-mode-line-front-space)
(moody-replace-mode-line-buffer-identification)
(moody-replace-vc-mode)

Or if you are using use-package.

(use-package moody
  :config
  (moody-replace-mode-line-front-space)
  (moody-replace-mode-line-buffer-identification)
  (moody-replace-vc-mode))

Moody provides functions named moody-replace-..., each of which replaces a particular element with a styled variant. These functions can also be called interactively, in which case they toggle between using the styled and vanilla variants of their respective element.

To learn what element substitutions are available out of the box, use M-x moody-replace- TAB.

Styling

Depending on the used theme, the mode-line and mode-line-inactive faces might need some additional/alternative styling, when using Moody.

Let’s go through some changes that are commonly required. We will be using set-face-attribute to achive this. The calls to that function should be placed right after load-theme.

Many themes set the :box attribute for these faces. That doesn’t work for Moody, so you might have to remove that.

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil :box nil)
(set-face-attribute 'mode-line-inactive nil :box nil)

If these faces inherit from other faces, you might have to use unspecified, instead of nil.

A look similar to boxes can be achieved by using the :overline and :underline attributes.

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil :overline "blue")
(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil :underline `(:color "blue" :position t))

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line-inactive nil :overline "green")
(set-face-attribute 'mode-line-inactive nil :underline `(:color "green" :position t))

Beginning with Emacs 29.1, we can use :position t to put the underline at the very bottom of the mode line. When using an older release, then this unfortunately can only be enabled globally.

(setq x-underline-at-descent-line t)