Replacing rich-minority with minions

Up until last week I'd been using rich-minority to curb the mode line clutter that many emacs users experience. I must've installed it a couple of years ago and I found it very useful. It did what I wanted it to do and stayed out of my way. So there was no need to touch it.

This is what the configuration looked like:

(use-package rich-minority
  :config
  (rich-minority-mode 1)
  (setq
   rm-blacklist
   (format
    "^ \\(%s\\)$"
    (mapconcat #'identity
               '("Fly.*"
                 "Projectile.*" "PgLn" "EditorConfig"
                 "Helm" "GitGutter" "Pipenv" "Elpy"
                 "Undo-Tree" "SP" "Abbrev")
               "\\|"))))

minions

I discovered minions¹ while browsing through tarsius' github. It was no accident, I was hoping to find interesting things there.

(use-package minions
    :config (minions-mode 1))

That's it! Now only the name of the major mode is displayed. All minor modes are tucked away in a menu that looks like ;-)². You can click on it or use the command minions-minor-modes-menu to access the menu. And this was also when I learned the meaning of this mysterious ;-) emoticon³ in several youtubers' mode lines.