At the bottom of the Vim editor, you will find two things:
In the default configuration, Vim has a simple and quite non-informative status line. To the right it shows the number of the current row and column, and to the left it shows the name of the file currently open (if any).
Whenever you execute a Vim command, the status line will disappear and the command buffer will be shown in that line instead. If the command you execute writes any messages, then those will be shown on the right of the status line.
For simple and fast file editing, this status line is adequate. But if you use Vim everyday and for a lot of different file formats, it would be nice to have a more informative status line.
In this recipe, we see some examples of how the status line can be made a lot more informative with simple methods.
The command that sets how the status line should look is simply called:
:set statusline...