This is a fairly niche thing, but maybe there’s a couple others out there who can use it. I wrote this several years back and still use it regularly, so thought it was time to make it public.
I use Org Mode to manage my calendar, but I also need:
- Access to it on my phone, in some kind of mobile-friendly way. Unfortunately, Emacs isn’t that, so I use org-export’s iCalendar backend to generate and upload
.icsfiles, which I subscribe to on my mobile calendar. - I often put appointments that need to occur at a physical location on my calendar (dentist, interview, etc), and need to easily get directions to those places on my phone.
If you set the LOCATION property of an entry in Org Mode, that gets put into the location of that appointment in the .ics file, which makes it very easy to bring up navigation from the calendar.
org-street is a tool to make populating those locations easy. It uses OSM’s free Nominatim geocoding service (by way of another library I wrote) to transform text like “ground kontrol” into its physical address, and automatically put it in the LOCATION property. Nominatim is completely free and requires no account, API keys, or other such barrier to entry nonsense, so there’s zero setup required.
I’m sure there are other interesting things that can be done with the nominatim and/or org-street packages as well.
I don’t, I’ve tried every mobile Org thing and none of them work very well IMO. I export an .ics file, upload it to a web server, and subscribe to that with ICSx on my phone. ICSx adds them to the normal system calendar, so the LOCATION prop turns into the calendar event location. Tapping it in the calendar app opens it in maps so you can navigate there.
Yes, very impressive stuff.