Have you ever wanted to be periodically reminded of something in Emacs
in an intrusive way? Perhaps, something like cron + alert("HI MOM")
for Emacs? Maybe you want to print a (de)motivational message every few
hours, or run some 1337-elisp to update your iWatch’s NTP server.
Enter run-with-idle-timer. Here’s an example that displays a message
every four hours:
;; paste this into your *scratch* buffer
;; execute with M-x eval-buffer RET
(defun debugging-advice ()
"Sage wisdom, from a computer."
(interactive)
(message "Have you tried turning it off and then on?"))
;; assign your timer to a variable. this is important -- without this,
;; you will be unable to easily cancel your timer
(setq my-timer (run-with-idle-timer 14400 t 'debugging-advice))
;; 4 hours (14,400 seconds) too soon? cancel it:
;; (cancel-timer my-timer)
You can view active timers with C-h v timer-idle-list RET.