Padding around modeline text?

Question

The text in my modeline fits exactly in the modeline, I would like to have some more padding above and below the text, couldn't find an option for it and don't know much about text properties in Emacs. How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

You can customize the :box attribute of the mode-line-face. From the documentation (C-hset-face-attributeRET

`:box'

VALUE specifies whether characters in FACE should have a box drawn around them. If VALUE is nil, explicitly don't draw boxes. If VALUE is t, draw a box with lines of width 1 in the foreground color of the face. If VALUE is a string, the string must be a color name, and the box is drawn in that color with a line width of 1. Otherwise, VALUE must be a property list of the form `(:line-width WIDTH :color COLOR :style STYLE)'. If a keyword/value pair is missing from the property list, a default value will be used for the value, as specified below. WIDTH specifies the width of the lines to draw; it defaults to 1.

So that following should give you the padding you want

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil
                    :box '(:line-width 3))

You might also want to give a certain background to the box, you can do that by specifying the :color property to the :box property something like below

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil
                :box '(:line-width 6 :color "gray20"))

Credits: I got this trick from Amit Patel's blog

Answer 2

A hacky solution could consist in adding a tall zero-width character at the beginning of your mode-line. Something like:

(setq-default mode-line-format
              (cons (propertize "\u200b" 'display '((raise -0.5) (height 2))) mode-line-format))