I'm a big fan of vim, but always thought that the vanilla statusline is both ugly and useless. During the years, I've been a user of vim-powerline, vim-airline and finally vim-lightline. Yesterday night, I was both too drunk and tired to do anything useful, so I was wondering if I could get the same sexy statusbar without using any plugin, and it turned out that it's pretty easy, once you know that:
- you have to escape spaces with
\ - everything between
%{…}will be evaluated - you can set colours with
%#your_colour_name# - everything you need to know is in
:help statusline
I'm a bit dissatisfied by my hack to get the current mode in a nice way, but I didn't manage to come up with something better. But since my vim is already notably faster when I'm scrolling, I don't care that much.
set statusline=
set statusline+=%#DiffAdd#%{(mode()=='n')?'\ \ NORMAL\ ':''}
set statusline+=%#DiffChange#%{(mode()=='i')?'\ \ INSERT\ ':''}
set statusline+=%#DiffDelete#%{(mode()=='r')?'\ \ RPLACE\ ':''}
set statusline+=%#Cursor#%{(mode()=='v')?'\ \ VISUAL\ ':''}
set statusline+=\ %n\ " buffer number
set statusline+=%#Visual# " colour
set statusline+=%{&paste?'\ PASTE\ ':''}
set statusline+=%{&spell?'\ SPELL\ ':''}
set statusline+=%#CursorIM# " colour
set statusline+=%R " readonly flag
set statusline+=%M " modified [+] flag
set statusline+=%#Cursor# " colour
set statusline+=%#CursorLine# " colour
set statusline+=\ %t\ " short file name
set statusline+=%= " right align
set statusline+=%#CursorLine# " colour
set statusline+=\ %Y\ " file type
set statusline+=%#CursorIM# " colour
set statusline+=\ %3l:%-2c\ " line + column
set statusline+=%#Cursor# " colour
set statusline+=\ %3p%%\ " percentage
The only fancy features that it comes with are dynamic colouring of the current mode and indication of the paste and spellcheck status.
My old bar:
My new bar:
The differences are intended.
You can find the rest of my vimrc here.