Randy Ridenour, whom I’ve written about before, has an interesting post on customizing the Emacs Dashboard. The Dashboard is something that appears when Emacs starts. It typically shows recently visited files and the current agenda items.
It’s configurable—of course, it’s Emacs—but Ridenour wasn’t happy with the default configurations. Emacs being Emacs, it was pretty easy to get things just the way he liked them. Part of that was displaying the agenda in a the usual way rather than just a list of activities. In particular, he like having the current time displayed—the way it is in grid view—and even arranged for it to appear in red so that it would stand out. He also arranged to have the agenda updated every minute so the time would always be up to date.
In addition to the agenda, he has a list of links that he wants to appear in the Dashboard so he has an Org file with a table of those links that he imports and then activates the links. At the end, he has a Dashboard with exactly the information he wants.
To be honest, I’ve never seen the point of Emacs Dashboards. My Emacs is always running so startup Dashboards don’t make any sense to me. I know you can start them whenever you like but, again, I’ve never seen the point. When I start Emacs, the first thing I do is start the agenda and mu4e. I could easily automate that but it’s so easy to start them by hand and I start Emacs so infrequently that it’s not worthwhile.
In any event, if you’re one of the many people who do like an Emacs Dashboard, Ridenour’s post may have some ideas that you can use.
Update : Added link.