I have a mode line that appears below the command line (attached).  It
has a bug here and there, but is fairly solid and pretty simple.

Steve

Ian Lynagh wrote:

> Hi all
>
> I have thought it would be nice to have a vim-a-like indicator of
> whether or not you are insert or command mode when using the vi line
> editting mode for a long time now. In a burst of enthusiasm I have
> put something together over the last couple of days (attached).
> However it's not quite as nice as it might have been and I have run
> into a few annoyances along the way.
>
> Initially I was planning to have the indicator in the prompt.
> However AFAICT once the prompt has been displayed it is cached, so
> even if you for zsh to redraw it (I tried various things like "zle
> redisplay", "zle push-input; zle get-line", "zle -R") it just
> redraws the old one. Did I miss a way to do this?
>
> Is there a reason why it shouldn't be possible to pipe something
> into source? Or another way to do it without a temporary file?
>
> With the script attached, if I paste a command in then only the
> first character is visible until I press ^R. If I type something
> else first then it works fine (even if I first delete what I
> typed!). Perhaps this is a bug?
>
> I also couldn't find a way to set the statusbar after accepting a
> command. zsh -M complains it's not being called from a widget if I
> call it from precmd.
>
> Finally I would welcome any comments/criticisms on the code!
>
> Thanks Ian