You know that flash-in-the-pan text editor
WriteRoom?
Some advocates of Emacs will say "just run emacs in a full-screen" or something along those lines, but I find sometimes that the mode-line is still a distraction.
So I'm working on an implementation of distraction removal in Emacs for two reasons: (1) I think the concept has merit and (2) I don't like the idea of
someone writing a whole new text editor just so they can have a certain feature. :)
My rough implementation is available for download.
Incase you want to know what emacs looks like without a modeline:

Basically, this implementation automatically hides the modeline when all of the following conditions apply:
- hide-mode-line is turned on
- there is only one frame
- there is only one window in that frame
- there is no minibuffer
and automatically shows all buffers' modelines otherwise.
This implementation does have bugs, you know: I intermittently have problems with text disappearing. Those problems might be related to the more frequent ones I have when I do
(setq mode-line-format nil) (or use hide-mode-line) in conjunction with
linum.