One of the first things I learned how to customize in emacs was the message that's presented in the scratch buffer.
This is a good place for reminders to see every now and again, as my usual flow is to let the default buffer come up, then press 'q' to dismiss it and get dropped into scratch.
To customize this, I simply add the following to my ~/.emacs file:
;; Set up a better scratch message.
(setq initial-scratch-message
";; This buffer is for notes you don't want to save, and for Lisp evaluation.
;; C-u C-x C-e evaluate last expression and insert into buffer
;; C-h r read emacs manual
;; C-h m describe-mode
;; C-h b display activing bindings
;; C-x C-+ increase font size, - for less and 0 to reset
")
I don't really restart emacs much, so I don't get to see this daily, but it's nice to have it around.
Happy scratching!
Tags: emacs