I run Emacs and my browser in full screen and I spend almost all my screen time in those two applications. That presents a (very) small problem: If I want to know the date, I have move the cursor to the bottom or top of the screen to reveal one or another date widget. That’s not very handy and, even worse, involves using the mouse. It’s one of those tiny problems that I’ve learned to live with.
Until today. Bram, over at the Emacs Mastadon, showed us a bit of code that displays the time in the modeline if Emacs is in full screen mode. It uses display-time-mode to do this. I toggled it on to see what it looked like. It only showed the time but I was pretty sure I could make a quick hack to have it add the date.
Then I remembered that this was Emacs and someone else must surely have thought of that so I checked the documentation. Sure enough, if you set the variable display-time-day-and-date to t, it will also display the date. Now when I need to know the date, it’s right there on the modeline.
That doesn’t solve the problem when I’m in the browser. Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be a Safari widget that displays the date but I’m no worse off than I was before when I’m in Safari and the problem had disappeared when I’m in Emacs.
Chipping away at small problems, mostly by tweaking Emacs: it is, as I’ve written previously, like maintaining a Japanese garden. A work always in progress but never completed.