Single mode line for all windows

Question

Is it possible to have only one mode line (sometimes referred as "statusbar") for all windows?

I'd like to make this single mode line show information about the currently selected buffer.

Answer 1

I don't have a solution for a single modeline, but here are two possible alternative solutions:

1. Only render the mode line in the active window:

If you use powerline, you could wrap your mode-line-format in:

((:eval (when (powerline-selected-window-active) ...)))

then change the mode-line-inactive face so blends with your background but still separates buffers with:

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line-inactive nil
                    :underline t
                    :background (face-background 'default))

This will look like this:

2. Use the frame-title-format

Your frame-title-format determines what is show on the top of your frame when running in a gui.

Set the frame-title-format' like you would yourmode-line-format` and them set your mode-line-format to something blank-ish.

Answer 2

I've finally achieved this by hacking emacs.

You can get the source code from https://github.com/amosbird/emacs/tree/onemodeline . Basically it uses mini-window's header line to render current buffer's modeline.