Tweaking Emacs Modeline With Powerline

It important to enjoy the development tools you use day after day, so after seeing some of the great looking Emacs modeline customisations, I couldnt resist pimping my modeline (again).

Previously I tweaked the modeline for Clojure development, this time I’ve added styling to the modeline using powerline. I aim to create a modeline worthy of the rest of the Emacs Live experience.

There are several other versions of powerline listed on the EmacsWiki powerline page.

Installing powerline

I use Emacs Live as my base configuration for Emacs, so I added the powerline project to my personal configuration ~/.live-packs/jr0cket-pack/

First I cloned the powerline Gitub repository into the lib folder of my live pack

cd ~/.live-packs/jr0cket-pack/lib
git clone https://github.com/milkypostman/powerline

Then I created a configuration file for the powerline project

emacslcient ~/.live-packs/jr0cket-pack/config/powerline.el &

Adding the following code to the powerline config file loads the files in lib/powerline. I also state which theme I want to use.

(require 'powerline)
(powerline-default-theme)

There are several other themes avaiable in powerline, including (powerline-center-theme) and (powerline-nano-theme)

Finally, I added a function to load the powerline library at startup in my Emacs Live live-pack init.el file, ~/.live-packs/jr0cket-pack/init.el

(live-load-config-file "powerline.el")

I restarted Emacs and was presented with my new modeline

In full screen with several windows open you can see the difference between active and inactive windows.

Summary

The powerline project is an easy way to tweak your modeline into something more stylised. Next I want to create my own powerline theme to have my own design touches and tailor it more to my needs.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket