Going full Luddite by removing the mode-line and using echo-area (smartly) instead.
Switch branches/tags
Nothing to show
Clone or download
tautologyclub use magit's function to obtain git branch
The old method was just incredibly hacky and bad.

If magit is not installed, we still use the old method as fallback (but who doesn't use magit anyway)
Latest commit 89ddf31 Sep 14, 2018

README.md

feebleline

For hardline Luddite editing!

Feebleline removes the modeline and replaces it with a slimmer proxy version, which displays some basic information in the echo area instead. This information is only displayed if the echo area is not used for anything else (but if you switch frame/window, it will replace whatever message is currently displayed).

The modeline gets restored when you toggle off feebleline-mode, of course.

Note on new version

If you upgrade feebleline and it errors, something like "error running timer feebleline-mode-line-proxy-fn" or whatever, then just toggle feebleline-mode on and then off (i.e. M-x feebleline twice).

Hopefully you'll like this new version better. If you don't, please share your reasoning in an issue :)

Customizations

There are some customizations available, check out

customize-group feebleline

to see what you can do. An example init snippet would look something like:

(use-package    feebleline
  :ensure       t
  :custom       (feebleline-show-git-branch             t)
                (feebleline-show-dir                    t)
                (feebleline-show-time                   nil)
                (feebleline-show-previous-buffer        nil)
  :config       (feebleline-mode 1))

Screenshots

This is a screenshow from the latest version (yes that is my actual ugly day-to-day theme):

ScreenShot

Outdated scrots

(but on less ugly theme :P)

ScreenShot

How it looks when the file has been modified: ScreenShot