Announcing Aquí
28 Sep 2026 Charles Choi
One of my favorite Emacs commands is sunrise-sunset (Sunrise/Sunset (GNU Emacs Manual)) to get the day’s times for sunrise and sunset. For it to work right, you must have Emacs pre-configured with location information. This is done by setting three customizable variables:
calendar-latitudecalendar-longitudecalendar-location-name
If you run Emacs on a system that is fixed in location, manually setting the above variables is a one time task. However if you do a fair amount of traveling with Emacs on a laptop, a more programmatic solution might be desired using a location service, ideally an OS-native one. If you’re a macOS user, Aquí (aqui.el) does just that by invoking a Shortcut to query the OS-native location service.
Leveraging Shortcuts gives Emacs access to a high-accuracy fused location update without need to build, install, and configure a separate macOS executable.
Once Aquí is installed, updating the location is done via the aqui command.
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This will update the above mentioned variables and message the current location in the mini-buffer.
For more information, refer to the Aquí User Guide.