Emacs: easily set timers with TMR

Hello everyone, my name is Proilos, also known as ProRot. In this video, I will demonstrate one of my packages for Emacs. This one is called TMR, which you can pronounce as an acronym, TMR, or as a single word, timer. What TMR does is it allows you to easily define timers optionally give them a description and have them inform you notify you when they elapse. This notification will be inside of Emacs as well as optionally outside of Emacs in your uh desktop environment and can also optionally include a a sound an alarm. Uh let's see this together in practice. The first point of entry is the MXTMR command. I will invoke this command now. And it asks me for a duration. At the heart of TMR is the idea of how we express the duration of a timer. We use a simple notation where we just give it a number. I will say for example five. If we just give it a number like this, it means minutes. So I will hit enter now and I get in the echo area of Emacs information about what has happened. It is telling me that a timer has started. It is giving me the start time. It will end. It is giving me the end time and this is the duration which is my input in this case the number five. So I see that it will start at 6 minutes past the hour and it will run until 11 minutes past the hour. there for 5 minutes. Okay, that is the most simple way to do a timer. Let's do another one. MXTMR. And now I will do five again and then I will add a suffix in this case the letter s. Now five means seconds. So let's do that. Enter. And again I get information about what has happened. And of course because it's 5 seconds you can hear the notification. Actually you should be hearing the audio. So you heard the audio. Uh there was a desktop notification on the side and there is also this echo area that persists here in Emacs which is informing me that the timer has elapsed. It started at this time. It ended at this time. So far so good. I see how I get notifications. I see how the alarm rings and I also see how the echo area persists the message here which informs me about what this was about. This is very good. Let's do another timer. So, MXTMR again. And now instead of a number which has meaning depending on the the current time, let's not think about the current time and try to add to it. Let's think about the end time. Let's say that I have to be places at 400 p.m. So let's say I will do now like this 16 hours on the clock. Enter. And now it will figure out what is the difference from 4 p.m. until now. And run a timer for that amount of minutes. In this case, we see it over here. Timer start uh 08 on the clock until uh the coming hour. Okay. And you get the idea of how you can define a timer like this. Minutes, seconds, you could do h for hours, or you could just give it the time you care about. This is to define basic timers, meaning timers that only have a duration. But you can do more. You can define a timer that also has a description. Let's do this. MXTMR with details. Same idea here. You are prompted for a duration. Let's do for example two minutes. Okay. And description for this timer uh my uh demo timer here. Okay. Some description. Any text you want. Enter. And then acknowledge timer after it is finished. Yes or no. For now I will say no. The next time I will say yes. Now look at the echo area. We have a slight difference here. We see the start time. We see the end time. We see the duration. But we also see the description. Okay. And uh when the timer elapses, we will get the notification now with the description included. So we will see that in a second. While we are waiting uh for that, let's see another option that we have. MX uh TMR edit description. Okay. So one of the timers I want to pick and edit its description. Let's go for example to that which is for one hour. It doesn't really matter. I will uh do this here. Uh this is the timer that uh runs until 4:00 p.m. whatever. Okay. And I just modified the description of an existing timer like that. The other timer should run uh any second now. But until that happens, let's do TMR tabulated view like this. TMR tabulated view. I hit enter. And now I get a tabulated list, a grid view of all my timers. And I get to see uh the start time, the end time, the duration, how much time remains, whether it is acknowledged or not, and if it has a description, what is that description? This buffer is designed to auto refresh after n amount of seconds which you can uh configure. Uh I have set it to 5 seconds here. It's a relatively conservative number. You could set it to 1 second if you really care about seeing this refresh the whole time or you can just set it to nil if you don't care about it at all. We see here 11 seconds and any any second now we will get the notification which I want you to see because now uh we get the desktop notification. We get all that and we got the demo timer the one with the description. This is what I wanted to show you about. We see that the description that we wrote is in the echo area. It was also in the desktop notification but maybe the text I'm using is too small for that for you to discern it. And also both timers run almost at the same time. So maybe that was a little bit confusing. But the idea is that when you write a description, you get to see that description over there. Now since I am uh here, let me now do another thing. Ctrl C and the letter T is the prefix key I have for all my timer commands. So you see all the timer commands over here. uh you can just uh inspect this with the help of the built-in which key mode. So you get to see what are the available key bindings that complete this sequence of keys. I don't need to go over each of these. Uh but the point is that you can add, remove, reschedu a timer and uh do the tabulated view. Me personally, I really like the tabulated view because it's easier to reason about what I am doing. So let me work from here. It's this one over here. What I want to do is uh MX describe mode. So describe mode is something you can use in any buffer to get information about the current major mode and all the active minor modes. And this helper buffer will also show you the relevant key bindings. So I do describe mode and here I get to see uh the TMR commands and you can expect them to be bound to the same keys that are behind this uh prefix that I showed you over here. No need to go through each of them. Let me do here a clone. TMR clone is the command. So I want to clone this timer or first of all let's say I want to just kill this timer. I don't really care about this right now. Okay, I kill it. And uh I want to also kill these. Let's just keep one timer around. What I want to do now is clone this one. Meaning play it again. So I will type C. And now I have run the command tmr clone. And now of course that timer is running. I can type E here to uh edit the description uh with this one instead. Okay. So I wrote a new description just like that. I can uh toggle the acknowledgement if I want. Uh so maybe we could do that. I forgot what is the key binding actually. Uh so toggle acknowledge. So I did that. So now it will be acknowledged. And uh let's actually change the duration so that we get to see what the acknowledgement is about to 5 seconds. Okay. So I changed the duration to 5 seconds. It did uh the whole thing over there and I get the notification. Let the audio uh play out. So I get the notification. I see here timer is up. I see the description that I wrote started ended. But now there is a difference. Now it's the mode line that is active and it is asking me the final line acknowledge with ACK or additional duration. If I type ACK then it's just done. It means okay I saw it. We are good here. Uh you can go away. Now if I give it a duration which is the same concept as we do before for example 10s it means run again for that amount of uh seconds. Okay. So I will do that 10s and uh let's see now what will uh happen. We should get the timer again. And it will again you see here. Let's play. I let it play. And again it is asking me to acknowledge it. So until I say okay, you're good. Enter. Uh I typed another thing. ACK enter. Now it's finished. Okay. So if you are uh doing something where uh you may be away from the computer and you want to make sure that you didn't forget to actually act on what you had a timer for. You want to have the acknowledgement set up. If you don't really care about it, you can just ignore it. You can just define your timers without it. Okay. So let's kill those timers. Let's kill everything. And now let's uh define a couple of timers. So I will use my prefix key over here to define a timer with details. Okay. So let's give it a more realistic. So uh let's have actually 30 minutes over here. And this is bake the bread. Okay. So bake the bread acknowledge after it is finished. I say no, I don't really care. Uh I have a timer like that. And now let's also define a timer uh which is uh let's do it for uh um 20 30 seconds. Let's do 30 seconds. Okay. Because or let's do one minute. Okay. So I can tell you about it and uh demo this one. Okay. Uh no need to acknowledge. While we are waiting for that timer, let me show you this other feature. MX TMR modeline mode. And the TMR modeline mode will include the timers on the mode line. You can see them over here. This one is running in seconds, 43, 42, and it goes. And this one is in minutes. We get the timer, the duration of it. If it has a description, we get that. And then we get all the timers like this. Uh once the timer is about to elapse, you will see that the colors will change. And basically, it's like telling you, hey, we're almost done here. And you will see that it will blink again, and it is now a red color. So, it is doing that. And basically it's a countdown until uh the time when it elapses. Uh so it's really that something uh simple. Uh I like this but me personally I don't really need this uh because I will have timers that run and I don't need to actually uh see them as they count down to zero. It's a nice thing to have but me personally I am fine without it. I like to have uh the timers in a tabulated list like this and work from there. Now the tabulated list for as long as there are timers running. Okay, so for as long as there are if you try to close Emacs which I will do now. Ctrl X controll C. Okay, I have it in a different key binding. If you try to close Emacs when timers are running, you will get this um state of affairs over here where the tabulated list will pop up and instead of Emacs closing, you will get an a warning. TMR has running timers. Exit anyway, yes or no. So of course, if you say yes, you just close Emacs. If you type N, it means no. And now you get to see the timer that is running over there. Okay. So this is a safety mechanism in case you have uh defined a timer for something that is important and then you do something else and you uh try to close Emacs. Maybe you try to close Emacs by mistake and it will basically save you and then you are uh good to go. So this is basically it uh folks. I will uh embed this video on my website and below the video I will include a sample configuration for TMR. You can always check the manual. It's uh thorough as with every package of mine. So that should be uh good for you. Uh I will include the link to my website in the description of this video if you are watching it on the video hosting platform. Thank you very much for your attention. Take care and goodbye for now. Bye-bye.

In this ~15-minute video I demonstrate a package of mine called "tmr" (pronounced as an acronym or as "timer"). It uses a simple notation to set the duration of a timer at the minibuffer prompt. Once the timer elapses, Emacs shows a notification. The desktop environment will also include one, as well as an audio alert (those are configurable). Timers can optionally have a description. They may also be listed in a tabulated/grid view, which makes it easier to work with them (to edit their description, reschedule them, etc.). Running timers may also be displayed on the mode line. The publication of this video is on my website, together with sample configuration: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-01-19-emacs-timers-tmr-demo/