Customizable statusline

[kirawi]

Following some discussion on #649, it might be a good idea to allow for a configurable statusline through templating. We can borrow some code from here, and make some of the changes suggested by Blaz: 'We might be able to reuse that with some tweaking (lazy_static -> once_cell, disabling styles for now).'

[Omnikar]

What should be used in the template string to indicate the separation between the left and right sides of the statusline? Maybe {|}? Also, should we allow things to be in the center of the statusline?

[kirawi]

Maybe we could use the alignment operators: <, >? It would just be relative to the left and right elements. Though I'm not sure how it would work in practice.

[Omnikar]

If we just use a "separator", such as {|}, like I mentioned, we can just allow left{|}center{|}right.

[kirawi]

Sounds good.

[Omnikar]

Though we'd have to decide what to do if there are less than 2 separators present in the format string. I think:

• 0: left
• 1: left{|}right

If you wanted only left and center or right and center, you could do left{|}center{|} or {|}center{|}right. And center-only can be achieved via {|}center{|}.

Alternatively, we could just enforce two separators, but I'm not too fond of that idea.

[gbaranski]

Or we could do

[statusline]
left = "editing {filename}"
center = "Date: {date}"
right = "LSP: {lsp-status}"

What do you think about that?

[kirawi]

Conditional templating would also be interesting, e.g. #447. Maybe something like the C++ short hand if else statement ((condition) ? expressionTrue : expressionFalse) with some predefined conditions?

[gbaranski]

I3status-rust does something similar to what we want. https://github.com/greshake/i3status-rust/blob/master/doc/blocks.md

[sudormrfbin]

Maybe something like the C++ short hand if else statement ((condition) ? expressionTrue : expressionFalse) with some predefined conditions?

I think we want to avoid introducing constructs like that since it will probably spiral into injecting more and more logic handling into a plain toml file and before we know it we would have invented a mini language that's similar to most things out there but also very different from most things out there. It was also brought up in Matrix a while ago and there was a (more or less) general consensus that it's better left to when we have a proper plugin system in place which can be used to dynamically define the config file or an actual configuration programming language (lisps were of interest last time IIRC).

[Omnikar]

Perhaps something that should be added as an option for a status line element: cursor count

[archseer]

Ah yeah, that's something we should add to the default status line too.

[bestouff]

I'd like to have this kind of eye candy in the status bar possible:

Here we see the git branch, file name, modification status, git lines added/changed/removed, LSP errors/warnings, in-tree indicator, LSP server and lang, and "scrollbar" position.
As showed here it uses nerd fonts, so that probably requires a config item to degrade from nerd font to plain unicode.

[NNBnh]

This look like a status line from Emacs (nope), looking good! I have composed a list of component for the statusline taking from Kakoune, Vim's airline and that Emacs's line above:

• Current position information:
  • Cursor line.
  • Cursor column.
  • Cursor display column.
  • Cursor position as a percentage of the whole file (a more simple approach to the "scrollbar position" that show on the Emacs screenshot).
  • Cursor count.
  • Current cursor number.
  • Search position (e.g: 10/20).
• Current mode.
• Buffer's line count.
• Filename.
• Filepath.
• Read-only flag (Helix currently doesn't support read-only buffer).
• Modification status.
• File encoding (e.g: "utf-8").
• Fileformat (e.g: "unix").
• Filetype (LSP server and lang).
• LSP errors/warnings.
• VCS information (git added/changed/removed).
• In-tree indicator (idk what this is...)

[bestouff]

This is the status line from Lunarvim (an easy to install full-fledged nvim config) but yeah.

[pickfire]

One more which I find useful is the search position from doom emacs, 10/20 like that.

[hahanein]

IntelliJ has a very simple status line configuration feature: https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/guide/tips/customize-status-bar/

It'd look a little like this:

// config.toml
[editor]
status-line = ["git-branch", "file-encoding", "search-position"]

VSCode is similarly restrictive. Furthermore, a plugin author may add status bar items using this API (alignment configurable).

In my mind this is really user friendly. Adding and removing features is straight-forward. No knowledge of a template language is required. No need to debug layouts (maybe less need to debug layouts).

If you want more control; if a plugin author wants to provide you with more control, they should be able to take full control over status line, though. However, in that case I'm not sure you'd want to impose restrictions such as the use of a specific template language or of specific alignment primitives (left, center, right).

A couple more data points:

• Kakoune appears to restrict customization to the right side of the status line: https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/wiki/Status-line
• As a user, adding git support to Vim's status line is rather painful in my mind: https://shapeshed.com/vim-statuslines

[Zoybean]

One thing I liked from my vim config was displaying the hex value of the character under the (primary, in helix' case) cursor. I'd love to have that in helix

[kirawi]

Resolved by #2434