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.
| (require 'fortune) | |
| ;; Be sure to set the following to your specific fortune files | |
| (setq fortune-dir "~/.fortunes" | |
| fortune-file "~/.fortunes/fortunes") | |
| (defun fortune-message (&optional file) | |
| "Display a fortune cookie to the mini-buffer. | |
| If called with a prefix, it has the same behavior as `fortune'. | |
| Optional FILE is a fortune file from which a cookie will be selected." | |
| (interactive (list (if current-prefix-arg | |
| (fortune-ask-file) | |
| fortune-file))) | |
| (message (fortune-generate))) | |
| (defun fortune-generate (&optional file) | |
| "Generate a new fortune and return it as a string. | |
| Without an optional FILE argument it will use the value of `fortune-file'." | |
| (save-excursion | |
| (progn (fortune-in-buffer t file) | |
| (with-current-buffer fortune-buffer-name | |
| (buffer-string))))) |
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…)
One thought on “Slight enhancement to fortune.el”
Comments are closed.