History of 2025-06-14 Automatically converting timestamps in Emacs

2025-06-14
13:26 UTC Revision 1 . . . . mborkThis is a third post in a short series of posts about code which helps me deal with numerical timestamps in Emacs. Last time I wrote a function which decides if a number is a Unix timestamp or a JavaScript Date and converts it to a human-readable ISO-8601 timestamp. What would be even more useful is to see the ISO representation of the timestamp at point without even doing anything. Emacs already has support for showing stuff related to the thing at point in the modeline – ElDoc. Several years ago I had some thoughts about using the ElDoc machinery to do something for me, but I found it too complicated then. Well, either they modified ElDoc to make it easier to program, or I matured as a programmer, or both. It turned out that it took me about 15 minutes to come up with a working prototype, which is extremely cool!