The Art Of Not Asking Why

If you’ve been using Emacs on macOS and iOS for a while, you probably know Álvaro Ramírez, the maker of Journelly and dwim-shell-command. I’m a fan of both.

Turns out Álvaro has a sponsorship page on GitHub. If you benefit from his work and look for a way to help out, this is it!

As part of a trip to see her friend, my mom went to a show of Porsche cars last week. This is a group of enthusiastic Porsche owners from different years. One of the stories she shared was about a proud Porsche owner who drives in countries that require the driver’s seat on the right (I’m assuming the UK or Ireland?) The driver, instead of abandoning his Porsche, had his beloved car set up with an adjustable steering wheel that can shift to the right or left side of the driver’s seat.

Emacers already know where this is going. We are all, in our own way, drivers just like this guy. The difference, of course, is that we drive Emacs, not a Porsche (though I’m sure there are a few of you out there who drive both!). I find this story inspiring because the laws that dictate where the driver should sit in the car are imposed. There’s nothing the driver could do about the law itself, so they came up with their own solution to work with the law in a clever way. Again… Emacs.

Emacs is not easy to drive in 2025. It has a steep learning curve, especially if you don’t have a good computer background. The other big problem is the outside restrictions. This blog is riddled with challenges I have with Emacs and different workarounds I came up with. I think this post I wrote earlier this year summarizes it well. To recap quickly: my work environment forces me to use applications that don’t play nice with Emacs. The biggest issue I have is with emails (only Outlook is allowed), but other cloud-based software is also problematic, usually because the only interaction with it is through the browser.

There are several community solutions for these issues. One of those is Emacs Everywhere, which I need to try to play with again (the issue I have there is creating a keyboard shortcut invoking a terminal command in macOS, which proved more challenging than I thought it would be), and there are more. But there’s also a bigger issue: there are plenty of new shiny apps out there, and next to Emacs, integration is always easier and nicer. Some of those, if I go deep into the rabbit hole, survive a day or two, even a weekend - but usually I go back to Emacs gasping for air. The overall issue with other apps is that they work nice, as long as you play by their rules and restrictions. As soon as you need to customize something, you’re out of luck. They are usually also all cloud-based, which is something else I don’t like. I know I’m old-fashioned, but I like that the cloud is there as a secondary place when I need it, not forced on me to use.

Some notable examples I visited again recently are both Apple tools: Notes and Journal. Notes got a few more tweaks, making it a useful as a personal database. I love how you can scan documents directly into the App, which works seemingly with the iPhone, and I love how I can now use it on my Apple Watch to check off items when I go grocery shopping. But I would never trust Apple to store my private notes on their servers. Journal has the same issue. The app itself matured nicely, with the addition of a macOS app. It comes with useful reminders, a map to see where entries were entered, a timeline, and a surprisingly good export option to HTML, including all the entries. But it’s also a good reminder of my point above: the date format.

I don’t like the US date format, especially in my personal notes. Org-mode automatically writes dates in a yyyy-mm-dd format, which has always made more sense to me (by the way, if you know a good app that can do that for the top menu in macOS, let me know. I’m surprised Apple doesn’t include that option natively. I’ve tried to change the region and play with the clock options in the past.)

The mindset that long-time Emacs users share with the Prosche driver is what got us into Emacs in the first place. We need things working out our way. In my case, I always liked checklists and bullet points, and I used several tools to help me organize things until I discovered Orgzly, and from there, org-mode and Emacs. I mentioned several times before that I owe my current professional successes (which include promotions at work, beyond just staying sane in a pretty chaotic environment) to org-mode, but that’s not exactly true. It’s the other way around: Emacs org-mode is a tool that enables me to use my mind the way I need to use it to work out information. I believe that if there were other tools that allowed me to change things as much as I can in Emacs, I would work with those too. But, in the age of the cloud, the opposite is true. Workflows are imposed, and customization to fit personal needs usually ends up being limited to dark and light themes.

Emacs is a rare tool that allows you to do whatever you want if you just look under the hood and tweak it to your needs. There aren’t many other programs like it, and I suspect that for most people, they are not needed. But for someone like me, adjusting to other tools doesn’t work well. And it’s not a good thing. I tried to force it a couple of times; believe me, if I were happy with Outlook, OneNote, and SharePoint, my work life would be much simpler. But I get disorganized, and I can’t work without my tools. If I like tinkering with something like Emacs, it’s not just for fun: if I don’t, I’m going to “glitch” until I fix it. It’s a battle uphill, a challenge—always was, and always will be. The benefit, however, is that it keeps me on my feet, and when I get something that works for me, it really works. Better than any other easy solution offered.

I found a potentially useful package that creates a visual calendar inside Emacs. It seems to be mostly abandoned, at least in its current form. It now requires ugly workarounds in order to work.

Does anyone know something like it that works currently?

Update: From the comments, I’m learning that taking the requirements for compat seems to be the official fix. This is a pretty nice package. I’m exploring it more in depth, and I might change some workflows I have accordingly. I find it amusing that I stumbled into it by chance, as I was writing my other post.