Taoline
Taoline removes the modeline and replaces it with a slimmer proxy version, which displays some basic information in the echo area instead. This information is only displayed if the echo area is not used for anything else (but if you switch frame/window, it will replace whatever message is currently displayed).
Troubleshooting
Just toggle taoline-mode on and then off (i.e. M-x taoline twice:).
Customizations
There are some customizations available, check out
(customize-group taoline)to see what you can do. An example init snippet would look something like:
(use-package taoline
:ensure t
:custom
(taoline-show-git-branch t)
(taoline-show-dir t)
(taoline-show-time nil)
(taoline-show-previous-buffer nil)
:config
(taoline-mode t))