Kris Carta has a nice post on a problem we all have: handling grocery shopping lists. If you’re single and a geek, this is not a problem. All sorts of solutions suggest themselves. The problem comes when you have a significant other that is not a geek but still likes to organize things on the computer.
If one or the other of you does all the meal planning and shopping it’s not too big a problem but in most households, both partners are making suggestions and adding things to the shopping list. If, in addition, the technical partner is an Emacs geek, the problem becomes how to import the non-technical partner’s suggestion into Emacs and how to export a final list to a smartphone application that either or both can use while shopping.
I wrote about this eight years ago and not a lot has changed. Carta is an Apple user and wanted to produce a shopping list in the iOS Reminders app. That’s what we do at the Irreal bunker too and it works well. All of us here, geek or not, is perfectly capable of using Reminders and marking off items as we buy them.
Carta has a separate wrinkle. He and his wife have always planned their meals in Notion and they wanted to export the items on their meal lists to their shopping list. Even though Carta is new to Emacs, he was able, with help, to figure out how to get the Notion data into Emacs and from there to isolate the food items for the shopping list and export them to Reminders. This leverages Applescript, which is definitely a pain, but provides functionality not available on other platforms.
Here at the bunker, we just enter the list into Reminders directly. That’s easier but not as pleasing to our geek sensibilities.