Some time in the late 1990s, after I'd been using GNU Emacs for a few years1, I grabbed a copy of Writing GNU Emacs Extensions. While I'd obviously created and added to and tinkered with my ~/.emacs some, I'd never written any non-trivial code. I feel it was around 1998 or 1999 that I really started to get into trying to write actual extensions, thanks to that book.

I can't remember what the first complete package was. I think it was actually 5x5.el2 but it might also have been binclock.el. Honestly, it's so long ago now that I don't have any good recollection and I don't have any record3. All of which is to say, binclock.el is one of my oldest bits of Emacs Lisp code, so it seemed fair that while I'm cleaning things up, I should give it a tidy too.

For anyone curious: it's a very simple binary clock type of thing. It opens a very small window and, depending on your settings, shows the time in various ways, all of which are in some way a binary display.

I can't say I've honestly ever had it running for more than a few moments, as an amusement, but I do remember it being a really helpful body of code to work on to help get familiar with Elisp. So, 27 years on from when I first opened the buffer to create it, it's tweaked and tidied and hopefully ready for another 27.

Would be cool if I'm around long enough to give it yet another tweak then.

  1. I first met it on OS/2 of all places, in 1994, or thereabouts. ↩

  2. Yes, the one that became Tools > Games > 5x5. ↩

  3. If I was using version control at all then, it was probably just rcs. ↩