The fortune utility remains one of my favorite programs (after all, it’s the name of this blog 🙂 ).  The random quotes are a refreshing reminder not to take myself too seriously.  But since I’ve been using byobu and GNU Screen, I rarely see the fortune cookie when my shell starts.

But then I realized what I really wanted was to see fortunes in Emacs.  Fortunately, there is a package, fortune.el, included in Emacs which provides a front-end to the fortune program.  When invoked with M-x fortune it throws the cookie into a new buffer and makes the new buffer active, which is slightly annoying.

What would be better would be to display the fortune in the mini-buffer.  Well, with the following code in your .emacs (or personal directory in prelude 😉 ), M-x fortune-message will do just that.  I’m considering submitting a patch, but there appears to be a bit of a procedure that I must review first.

Although, to get fortune.el to work I had to create a new writable fortune file as it was not satisfied using the read-only fortunes included with my distribution.  And now I have cookies on demand (om nom nom…)