ghostline

a vim statusline/tabline created and preferred by a certain ghost-type pokémon

ghostline started as an experiment to write my own status-bar and tab-bar and understand the things that vim-airline was doing under-the-hood to create its fancy UI. Over time it became one of my testbeds for writing vim-script and displaying more information in a relatively compact form.

The statusline includes integration with vim-fugitive (displaying the current branch/commit) and ALE (displaying the number of errors in the current buffer, if any.

If there is an active quickfix or location list, the count and current item number will be displayed:

If there are files in the argument list, the count and current index will also be displayed. Local argument lists will be displayed in the window for that list; the global argument list will be displayed in the first window that doesn't have a local list.

tabline

ghostline also includes a custom tabline, displaying active buffers, including their modified status:

Certain kinds of buffers (help windows, quickfix/location list windows, preview windows) will only be shown in the tabline if they're currently visible. If one of these windows isn't the currently-active one, they will be displayed on the right side of the tabline:

If there are active tabs, the buffer list will continue to be displayed, but an additional indicator will be added with the number of the current tab:

The current buffer will always be shown in the top left. Right next to it is the buffer for the "alternate" file (:help alternate-file), which can be accessed using Ctrl-^ (:help CTRL-^). The alternate file's buffer is also indicated using a ^ by the buffer number instead of #. The remaining buffers are then listed after that.

If misdreavus-mru is installed and enabled, the MRU list for the current window is used for the "lead tabs" instead, meaning that the buffer before the "lead tabs" marker (the || in the bar or the last buffer if no || is listed) will be the one switched to with the <Plug>RotateMru action.

fill color

The highlight color used to color the blank space between the "left tabs" and "right tabs" is configurable by setting the g:ghostline_tab_fill_color variable. For example, the sample images here use the Folded color. I recommend configuring this per-color scheme, using something like this:

function! SetTabFill(colors_name)
    if a:colors_name == 'lucius'
        let g:ghostline_tab_fill_color = 'Folded'
    else
        unlet! g:ghostline_tab_fill_color " defaults to TabLineFill
    endif
endfunction

augroup GhostlineVimrc
    autocmd!
    autocmd ColorSchemePre * call SetTabFill(expand('<amatch>'))
augroup END

If you set the autocmd after you call :colorscheme in your configuration, you may need to add a call SetTabFill(g:colors_name) to make sure that it's properly set up when Vim is loaded.

installing

Point your preferred plugin manager at 'QuietMisdreavus/ghostline', or clone this repo into your pack/ or bundle/ folder, or however you add vim plugins to your config.

license

ghostline is available under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0. For more information, check the LICENSE file.