Display Active Clock in Emacs Frame Title

I thought it would be helpful to modify the title of the Emacs frame to display the Org task I'm clocked in to. It turns out to be a lot easier than it sounds -- just change one Org variable in Customize.

The variable is org-clock-clocked-in-display. Its default value is mode-line. This means that the active clock displays only in the mode line. But it can have one of three other values: nil, frame title, both.

I've set it to both. Now the clocked task displays in both the mode line and the frame title. It shows the clock duration in square brackets followed by the task heading in parentheses, as shown below.

This simple update has improved my productivity significantly. The prominent display of the clocked task reminds me of what I started to do before I went down yet another rabbit. Not that rabbit holes are all bad -- I was in a rabbit hole yesterday when I found org-clock-clocked-in-display.

Try it out!

One Space or Two?

HTML enforces the use of a single space to separate sentences. If you want to add another space, you need to use  . I still remember how annoyed I was about that. Back in the century in which I took my technical writing course, two spaces were required. Of course, we weren't using computers very often; hand-written sentences needed to appear more separated than the words within.

I'm definitely not here to convince anyone to switch. Instead, I just want to share that I paid close attention to this detail when I was formulating my style guide for this blog. Should I continue with my out-of-date two-space habit? Or should I adopt the current convention?

I turned to Emacs itself for guidance. It turns out that the individuals who wrote Emacs comments, docstrings and help text used two spaces. Although many times they started each sentence on a new line.

It turns out that the content here mostly is one-space. I start out using two spaces in Org where most of this originates. But when I export to HTML, that second space vaporizes. That would seem like a bug to me.

The only place where you'll see evidence of my two-space style is in the comments and docstrings of my source code.

Am I the only person who nit picks about such details?

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Thanks to Irreal for highlighting a customization from macosguru

Emacs Smiley Functions

Here's what my Emacs Tip of the Day dug up: smiley-buffer