Displaying Date and Time in Emacs

1 min read
189 words

I so enjoy working in Emacs on my Chromebook. This prompts me to investigate how to get more information so I don’t have to switch over to the Chrome side for web searches. As I have explained in Using EWw on Emacs I try to read so much more of these web pages on the Linux side, especially those pages which I will refer back to over and over again.

After switching from emacspeak to speechd.el I have missed some functionality. One of the things I have missed is checking the time. Of course I have my watch, my phone and the status display on the launcher on the Chrome side, but I was convinced it should be possible to get this information without leaving Emacs.

And I can!

The key combination C-c RET reads the mode line in Emacs with speechd.el. I added these two lines to init.el to have the date and time placed there:

'(display-time-day-and-date t)
'(display-time-mode t)

Voila! I can use C-e RET to hear the day of the week, the date and the time. No flipping about.

Note

Other information in the mode line will be read also.