Build your own Vim statusline

Statuslines in Vim are not hard to create. Making your own means one less dependency in your life.

May 12, 2017
Updated October 2, 2023

What is a statusline in Vim? ¶

The statusline in Vim is the bar along the bottom of the Vim window. By default it does not show when you open Vim until there is more than one window. The statusline is intended to give you information about the status of a buffer with the default statusline including the path, permissions, line and a percentage representation of where you are in the file. For many people the default behaviour of vim is enough and you can get on with your life without having to configure anything.

Showing the statusline ¶

The statusline can be shown regardless of whether you have more than one buffer open with the following setting in your .vimrc.

set laststatus=2

Similarly it may be disabled entirely if you never want to see it.

set laststatus=0

Hello World statusline ¶

A very basic statusline can be achieved by adding the following to the .vimrc file.

First ensure that the status bar is enabled all the time.

set laststatus=2

Then set the statusline

set statusline=helloworld

Reload Vim and a not so useful hello world status bar will show.

Building a statusline ¶

A useful pattern to use when building a statusline is to concatenate the line and build the statusline over multiple lines in your vimrc

set statusline=
set statusline+=hello
set statusline+=world

This makes the statusline easier to read when building and maintaining it.

Vimscript functions ¶

Statuslines can use Vim functions and it is possible to show anything that can be programmed in Vimscript in the statusline. This might be the weather, the price of ETH or more commonly the git branch that you are on. The following returns the current branch and an empty string if there is no git repository.

function! GitBranch()
  return system("git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null | tr -d '\n'")
endfunction

function! StatuslineGit()
  let l:branchname = GitBranch()
  return strlen(l:branchname) > 0?'  '.l:branchname.' ':''
endfunction

This function can then be used in a statusline.

set statusline=
set statusline+=%{StatuslineGit()}

A statusline showing the current git branch

Showing data ¶

Vim has a number of variables that may be used in status lines. The f character for example shows the path to the file in the buffer and the vim documentation outlines clearly the data that can be shown.

set statusline=
set statusline+=\ %f

Colour ¶

Colour is perhaps the hardest part to configure in statuslines. The documentation is harder to decipher here but offers the highlight colour names that may be used to change the colour of the statusline. These colors are named highlights and will vary with your colorscheme, you can preview all highlight groups with :so $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/hitest.vim. The syntax for using these color groups is as follows:

set statusline=
set statusline+=%#LineNr#
set statusline+=\ %f

A few lines over a plugin ¶

After reading the documentation and understanding how statuslines work it was easy to construct a statusline that works for me.

function! GitBranch()
  return system("git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null | tr -d '\n'")
endfunction

function! StatuslineGit()
  let l:branchname = GitBranch()
  return strlen(l:branchname) > 0?'  '.l:branchname.' ':''
endfunction

set statusline=
set statusline+=%#PmenuSel#
set statusline+=%{StatuslineGit()}
set statusline+=%#LineNr#
set statusline+=\ %f
set statusline+=%m\
set statusline+=%=
set statusline+=%#CursorColumn#
set statusline+=\ %y
set statusline+=\ %{&fileencoding?&fileencoding:&encoding}
set statusline+=\[%{&fileformat}\]
set statusline+=\ %p%%
set statusline+=\ %l:%c
set statusline+=\

Neovim ¶

The Neovim community has a number of plugins written in Lua.

You can also create your own status line in Lua. Here is the same custom status line ported from Vimscript to Lua.

local function git_branch()
    local branch = vim.fn.system("git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null | tr -d '\n'")
    if string.len(branch) > 0 then
        return branch
    else
        return ":"
    end
end

local function statusline()
    local set_color_1 = "%#PmenuSel#"
    local branch = git_branch()
    local set_color_2 = "%#LineNr#"
    local file_name = " %f"
    local modified = "%m"
    local align_right = "%="
    local fileencoding = " %{&fileencoding?&fileencoding:&encoding}"
    local fileformat = " [%{&fileformat}]"
    local filetype = " %y"
    local percentage = " %p%%"
    local linecol = " %l:%c"

    return string.format(
        "%s %s %s%s%s%s%s%s%s%s%s",
        set_color_1,
        branch,
        set_color_2,
        file_name,
        modified,
        align_right,
        filetype,
        fileencoding,
        fileformat,
        percentage,
        linecol
    )
end

vim.opt.statusline = statusline()

Of course it may be easier for you to use powerline, airline or lualine. Personally 22 lines of code is enough to have a working statusline and I have one fewer dependency.