Elisp

Some time ago, I decided to customize my Emacs startup screen in order to display something helpful for me. Ultimately, after much consideration, I settled on the following items I just want to see on my startup screen: 1) 3-month calendar, 2) agenda, 3) diary, 4) something just for fun.

No doubt, there are a number of packages that can assist you in making a pretty good-looking startup screen – like enlight, for instance. However, I decided to construct my own startup screen, a very simple one.

It requires having two command line utilities installed on your system: fortune to print out a random epigram, and calendar to print out some of the events that have occurred on the current date in the past. If you, like me, are using Linux or macOS – it will not be difficult to install them.

And this is what I got…

In his comment on Irreal’s post Some Configuration To Solve Common Problems, gregbognar noted that some of my configuration is seriously outdated. In some sense, he is absolutely correct – I’ve been collecting Emacs settings/tweaks since 2012, and keeping them unmodified for 12+ years.

But on the other hand, it demonstrates how stable and powerful Emacs is – everything is still working! If something works, don’t fix it – I’ve since tried to apply this rule wherever possible.

Here are a few functions/enhancements I found helpful.

I’m happy to be back after one year away and it feels great.

Below are some chaotic mini/micro – or even nano – excerpts from my ~/.emacs file I have been tuning in for 12 years. These days, I’m running Emacs 29.4 on Ubuntu (Pop!_OS) 22.04 and, rarely, on macOS.

After reading a quite interesting post by Irreal on Org mode clock tables, I decided to share my — a bit specific — experience with the subject.

Working with satellite data I often have to convert a coordinate value or an angle value from the DMS notation (degree@minute’second") to a decimal degree in the floating point number format and vice versa.