Customizing Doom Emacs' dashboard (splash screen)

[nots1dd]

I confirm that...

• I searched the FAQ, issue tracker, discussions board, documentation, and wiki, and did not find an answer to my question.

• Any discussions with or conclusions derived from the use of LLMs will be omitted from my question.

What is your question?

While this frameworks docs are quite extensive on mostly everything required, I found it very difficult to find any reliable info on how to properly configure the dashboard module (or splash screen).

For context, I have gone through doomemacs/core docs, and an official answer to this question on doomemacs' discourse page (note that this site is down currently, they seemed to have moved to github discussions but I could not find any discussions on this topic). The rest seem to go nowhere (ex: the wiki link here contains nothing, official doom domain just redirects to the github org's url.

So far, the only thing I could customize was the fancy-splash-image, however if there is a way to configure the menu options, custom footer or title, and so on, it would be great to have that information easily accessible.

Naturally I would expect more documentation about this in the getting started doc file here about the dashboard itself and how it can be tweaked.

Note: I am a total beginner to doom and emacs in general

System information

No response

[hlissner]

When you visited the discourse and noticed that it had moved, did you get this page?

It links to this gist, where I've temporarily archived some of the Discourse posts, including the post on customizing your dashboard.

EDIT: Oh, I just noticed my link to the dashboard article was pointed to the wrong page (and in the gist index too) 🤦. Just fixed it.

[nots1dd]

Yea, I couldn't find the dashboard customization link before in the archives but now I can.

Thank you very much and love the work btw, am considering making it my main after I get used to its ergonomics.

[nots1dd]

Hi @hlissner, just a follow up since it is not mentioned in the doc, how can i overwrite the footer string instead of appending?

(add-hook! '+dashboard-functions :append
           ;; The `+dashboard-insert` function centers the text (actually, it makes the text
           ;; respect the value of the `+dashboard-anchor' variable, which is set to
           ;;`(center . center)` by default).
           (+dashboard-insert "Hello s1dd!"))

So initially I had this string and I loaded it it appeared fine, but then I made a change to the string and I assumed it would overwrite the previous footer content but instead it appended and now I can see 2 footers, how can I fix this? Thanks for helping out

Edit: ignore this message as am not sure why it was appending after I reloaded the config, but after I terminated emacs and opened a fresh session it is working as intended.

[hlissner]

So initially I had this string and I loaded it it appeared fine, but then I made a change to the string and I assumed it would overwrite the previous footer content but instead it appended and now I can see 2 footers, how can I fix this? Thanks for helping out

add-hook (and add-hook!) adds a function to a hook if it isn't already in the hook, but you are effectively passing an anonymous function to add-hook!, whose "identity" correlates to its contents. If you change its contents, as far as its concerned, it's a brand new function and will append the new one to +dashboard-functions after the previous implementation, and now you have two footers.

For this to work as you expect, you'd have to evaluate remove-hook! with the exact old function to remove the first before evaluating add-hook! again with the new to add the new one.

Alternatively, give the function a name:

(add-hook! '+dashboard-functions :append
  (defun my-dashboard-footer ()
    ;; The `+dashboard-insert` function centers the text (actually, it makes the text
    ;; respect the value of the `+dashboard-anchor' variable, which is set to
    ;;`(center . center)` by default).
    (+dashboard-insert "Hello s1dd!")))

If add-hook! already sees a function called my-dashboard-footer in +dashboard-functions it won't do anything, and re-evaluating the defun will redefine the function, changing its behavior.