Easy way to make Emacs look more "modern"

[Daniele Nicolodi]

Hello,

congratulations on the recent major release!

I know that the matter is very subjective (and maybe a similar 
suggestion has been discussed already, although I don't remember seeing 
anything like this) but I would like to suggest what I think is an easy 
way to refresh the look of Emacs and adapt it to the 2020ies taste :-)

I think the Emacs default theme is extremely well curated. However, the 
mode-line has an outdated feel to me. I recently reconfigured it just 
slightly and I thing the look of Emacs improves significantly.

The base of the modification is this:

(let ((bg (face-attribute 'mode-line :background)))
  (set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil
                      :box (list :line-width 4 :color bg :style nil)))

Namely I remove the 1990ies pseudo 3D box and I replace with a slightly 
wider flat box. The total extend of my customization is actually:

(set-face-attribute 'mode-line nil
                    :height 110
                    :background "grey88"
                    :box '(:line-width 4 :color "grey88" :style nil))
(set-face-attribute 'mode-line-inactive nil
                    :height 110
                    :background "grey95"
                    :box '(:line-width 4 :color "grey95" :style nil))

Where I also reduce the font size slightly compared to my main font 
sizer and I use lighter gray tones that better match the rest of my 
desktop, but I realize these are probably even more subjective preferences.

Maybe something to consider for the next major release.

I would also like to give some more air (padding) to the minibuffer, but 
I haven't found a way to do that in the 10 minutes that I looked at it.

Cheers,
Dan