Despite what I wrote last time about tmr, I’ve come to realize that deep down I’m a timer nerd. As my family will tell you, I can be anal about following directions precisely. If the recipe says to beat the eggs for 30 seconds, I feel uncomfortable if I don’t have some way of measuring those 30 seconds more or less accurately.
Once I got my iWatch with it’s excellent and easy to use timer app, my inner timer nerd was released and now it seems I’m always using a timer for some reason or another. Given that I spend a huge amount of my time staring at a computer screen—most often in Emacs—it makes sense to be able to set and manage timers there too.
Prot to the rescue. His tmr package is just what you need to set and manage timers from within Emacs. He’s got a great video up that demonstrates tmr and its capabilities. It’s a lot more than just, “Beep after x seconds”. You can have multiple timers that you can set to fire after a given number of seconds, minutes, or hours. You can also set the timer to fire at a certain time.
You can add descriptions to each timer and display them all in a grid layout to see how much time, if any, is remaining in each timer, when it started, and when it will expire. You can also arrange to display the time remaining on each timer in the mode line if you like.
See Prot’s video for all the details. The video is 14 minutes, 32 seconds long so it should be easy to find time for it. Installation and configuration is easy so give it a try if you are also a timer nerd.