Rainer König has the latest video in his OrgMode Tutorial series up. This time it’s about synching Google calendar to the Org agenda. Many folks, even those who otherwise live in Emacs, prefer to maintain a separate calendar. Most calendar apps can generate alarms, can share calendars with other people, and can be accessed from your smartphone so they offer some advantages over keeping everything in the agenda.
König uses Gcal for this because it meets all those requirements but he would really like to see the entries in his daily and weekly agendas. It turns out to be pretty easy to do. You just set up a cron job to import your .ics files from Google and add them to your diary file. You tell Org mode to include the diary in the agenda and everything just works. See the video for the details.
Because I have no interest in letting Google harvest my information and sell it to one and all, I don’t use Gcal but as an Apple user I have access to the Calendar app, which provides the same functionality1. There is already a contributed package, org-mac-iCal that will import the Apple calendar into the Org agenda. It’s available from Melpa if you’d like to try it out. From a quick scan of the code, it looks like it does the same thing that König does: it grabs the calendar files and adds them to the diary.
König’s method should work with any calendar app that uses .ics files so if you’ve been looking for a way to see your calendar entries in your Org agenda, take a look at the video.
Footnotes:
I probably can’t share calendars with non-Apple users but the need has never come up so I haven’t looked into the possibility.