Customizing The Emacs Startup Screen

The Emacs Cat has another interesting post. This time it’s about customizing the Emacs startup screen. He wants to see something useful when Emacs starts up. In particular, he’d like to see

  • A calendar
  • His agenda
  • His diary
  • A random aphorism

It’s actually pretty easy to do that. You may or may not want his exact configuration but it’s very easy to adapt his code to suit yourself.

I already have some code to instantiate two side-by-side empty screens on startup but I almost always immediately start an agenda in the right screen. It seemed to me that maybe I should adopt and adapt the Cat’s code to start the agenda automatically. On the other hand, I almost never restart Emacs so I’m not sure a lot of effort configuring that for startup is worth the trouble.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do but if you would like to have a specific configuration for your startup screens, take a look at the Emacs Cat’s post. The magic is done with some Elisp but it’s pretty simple so if you are at all familiar with basic Elisp, you shouldn’t have any trouble adapting it for your particular use case.

This is yet another case of Emacs making it easy to have things your way. If you want to see something specific when Emacs starts up, it’s pretty easy to make that happen.

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