No, not that Sunrise, Sunset. This one. Today’s post is just a quickie on some already plowed ground. Eight years ago, I wrote about finding the times of sunrise and sunset from within Emacs. I thought it was sort of interesting but never did anything about it.
Now Charles Choi has resurrected the subject. He likes to walk in the evening and finds it useful to know when the sun will set. It turns out that this is easy to do from within Emacs. One more reason to never leave the comfort of our favorite editor.
The only wrinkle is that you have to know the latitude/longitude of your current location. On macOS, that’s easy to find. Just open the Map application and your current location will be marked on the map. Click on that and it brings up an information block that, among other things, tells you the lat/lon coordinates. I’m sure the process is similar on Google maps or whatever you use on your system.
I don’t really have any need for this because:
- I seldom care about the comings and goings of the sun
- The sunrise/sunset times are available from the Apple Weather app, which is just a hotkey (via Alfred) away.
Still, it’s good to be able to do as much as possible in Emacs so I added the lat/lon to my init.el and I can now query the sun’s appearance and disappearance right from Emacs. It’s especially nice to do it from the Org agenda. See Choi’s post for the details.