Emacs 23.3 - default-mode-line-format obsolete?

Question

I switched from emacs 23.1 to emacs 23.3. I had in my configuration file a setting like the following:

(setq default-mode-line-format '(
    string-one
    string-two
    more-strings
))

Emacs responds that default-mode-line-format became obsolete since emacs 23.2, and says to use mode-line-format instead, but simply replacing default-mode-line-format with mode-line-format does not seem to work. How can I fix it to work with emacs 23.3?

Answer 1

If you read the documentation for mode-line-format, you'll notice it says:

Automatically becomes buffer-local when set in any fashion.

And what that means is that in order for you to change the value for all buffers, you need to use setq-default like so:

(setq-default mode-line-format 
      '(string-one
        string-two
        more-strings))

Documentation links: buffer-local variables, describe-variable (bound to C-h v).