#+TITLE: Deploying evil-hl-line and highly visual indicators
#+DATE: 2026-05-12

* TL;DR

I just released a public Emacs package, `evil-hl-line`, that adds a bright line‑highlight to indicate the current Evil state.  [[https://github.com/anerisgreat/evil-hl-line][GitHub]]

* Why I made this package

I am an addicted evil-mode user. I mainlined vim (well, Neovim) and tmux for a year before switching to Emacs, so by the time I became enlightened I was set on using vim-style key bindings, and so I found myself to be an evil man.

Early on in my vim journey I kept hitting the wrong keys because I was not sure what mode I was in. The same continued to happen in Emacs with Evil mode. Especially with many windows open, constantly changing modes and pages and tabs means constantly forgetting which mode I am in, and pressing the wrong keys, resulting in unwated consequences. I would start typing thinking I am in insert mode, and accidentally delete a few paragraphs! The time these mistakes waste is annoying, but the most frustrating part is the drailement of my train of thought.

Of course, there already exists visual indicator that tells us which mode is active. In Emacs, using evil mode introduces a little text inside the mode line that says what the current mode is (In vim such a thing exists too, of course). Even with these, I still found myself using the wrong mode often.

* A fix - highly visual indicators

Just because something is visible doesn't mean it is seen. I don't think this is a controversial take by any means - but it often isn't taken into account when designing user interfaces.

When using vim+tmux,  one of the biggest problems was knowing which window I was in. I would start typing in one shell or window and realized that I completely trashed another window. My solution was to make the active buffer background brighter, so that at a glance it would be obvious which window was selected. Once moving to Emacs I had to settle for only changing the color of the mode line, along with using hl-line-mode. Either way - it worked. I was far less confused as to which window was receiving my inputs because of this journey.

I think my main guide is this - information that is necessary to act on at high frequency needs to be shown very visibly. There is a clear benefit to making the current state of a system not only understandable, but _clearly obvious_ at a _glance_.

Knowing this, it seemed only natural to fix the mode confusion with a very obvious indicator as to which mode I am in. I have been using some version of =evil-hl-line= for a while, and am very pleased with the results.

If you use evil mode in Emacs, I think you may find this approach helpful, and I hope you will find this package useful!