evil: mode line tags and state echoing

Sat Oct 29 20:58:52 CEST 2011

Hey there,

I just stumbled across evil for emacs. And I like it. I'm actually
surprised with how much I like it out of the box...

There was one thing though, the mode line tags, which didn't quite fit
into my existing mode line setup. I looked into it and thought I needed
to use `evil-put-property' to alter that stuff. But when I used
`evil-get-property' to take a look at which value was looked up, I found
that there was a variable in place already; namely `evil-*-state-tag'.

So, not I can just do:

(setq evil-normal-state-tag "(n)")

which is great. I'm not sure if that's the intended way, though, because
I didn't find this in the documentation (I may have missed it, of
course). I guess my real question is: Will the `evil-*-state-tag' stuff

be a stable way to configure this? (Because I don't like changing my
setup all the time for no apparent reason.)

The second thing is the echoing of "--- INSERT ---" etc. in the
mini-buffer when changing states. I understand that it's vim-ish, but it
distracts me little too much. It'd be great if that could be made
optional.

Here's a patch which does the trick (although I'm not sure I caught all
places):