Customize the Emacs modeline color (Shallow Thoughts)

Customize the Emacs modeline color

I wrote last week about how to customize syntax highlighting colors in Emacs. And as part of that, I ditched the color theme I'd been using and let Emacs go back to its default colors.

Which mostly was fine, except that when I split the window into two windows, to look at two files at once or two different parts of the same file, the separator between the two windows -- the mode line -- was the same grey as Emacs's normal background, so it wasn't very obvious where the window split was.

A web search turned out lots of different ways to set the mode line color. Many of them involve color themes and are fairly complicated. Here's the simplest method I found:

(set-face-foreground 'modeline "white")
(set-face-background 'modeline "purple")
(set-face-background 'modeline-inactive "light blue")

You can set your active mode line to a pretty color, so it stands out a bit and makes it easy to tell which of the visible windows is the one you're actually typing in, and set the inactive mode lines -- windows that are visible but you arne't actually typing in -- to a less striking color.