Protesilaos Stavrou has posted another of his excellent videos on Emacs. This time it’s about the Emacs Diary and Calendar operations and how they work together. It turns out that the diary and the calendar are tightly integrated and work together to provide a particularly nice workflow.
If you use the diary feature, you should definitely watch Stavrou’s video. There are lots of features involving the calendar that you may not know about. The same advice applies if you’re looking for a simple reminder list. Even though Stavrou doesn’t use the diary as a diary, his video shows you how to use it that way too.
As Stavrou notes, you can do all this in Org mode as I and many others do. Stavrou, though, wants a simple system to remind him of upcoming tasks and doesn’t need or want the extra functionality that Org offers for this particular job.
As usual, Stavrou has tweaked things to better fit his needs. For example, he’s added a bit of Elisp to to send him an email every morning with the day’s events. He also configured the diary is give him a warning \(X\) minutes before an event.
He’s built a nice system that works well for him and probably others but I’m already doing all this in Org-mode and don’t intend to change. If I were just starting, though I would give it some serious thought. Likewise, if I ever decide to keep a diary—in the sense of today’s thoughts and observations—I’d almost certainly use the diary for that.