At home, we're tying to re-establish a good weekly meal planning & grocery shopping routine.

For many years the steps have been:

1. Open up Notion
2. Make a new page like "Meal Plan: Week 2"
3. Write down what we'll eat on each day
4. For each meal, list out the items we need to get for it
5. (Add anything else we need to get for the week, like detergent)

The end result looks something like this:

With the meal plan written down, now we need to make a shopping list.

We've started using a shared "Shopping" list in Apple Reminders. The UX is great, and it all works quite well when we're actively shopping.^{1 2} We also have widgets on our phones so we can check the list with some quick gestures.

The irritating part is getting the items into the shopping list. I struggled to find a satisfying way to automate this part 😣³ (until now!) .

At an impasse, I had given up, and kept awkwardly copy-pasting the ingredients from Notion over to Apple Reminders - of course this felt wrong every time I did it!

Recently I came across this page showing how to invoke AppleScript from Emacs (because of course that's in Emacs!).

I loathe AppleScript far more than is probably healthy, but sometimes it's the right - i.e. only - tool for the job.

After many iterations and some consultations with my private Emacs tutor, ChatGPT, I scratched together a function to add an item into the Shopping list in Apple Reminders:

Note: if this code can be improved, let me know! I'm still a beginner here and guidance is greatly appreciated.

(defun my-add-item-to-shopping-reminders (item)
  "Prompt for ITEM and add it to the ‘Shopping’ list in Apple Reminders."
  (interactive "sAdd item to Shopping: ")
  (let ((as-command (format
	"tell application \"Reminders\"
		tell list \"Shopping\"
			make new reminder with properties {name:\"%s\"}
		end tell
	end tell"
	item)))
    (message "AppleScript: %s" as-command)  ;; Debug
    (shell-command (format "osascript -e '%s'" as-command))))

I ended up going with shell-command and osascript because I couldn't get past permissions issues between Emacs and Reminders when using do-applescript - I spent a lot of time troubleshooting this before finally giving up 😞

With this milestone reached, there was just one step remaining: process the shopping list items, using the power of Emacs 🙌

With a deal great more iterations and head-scratching, I managed to make a script that:

1. Parses an Org buffer into an AST
2. Gets all the list items from the AST
3. Gets the content of the list items and pushes it into a list
4. For each item in the list of content, calls AppleScript to add it to the Apple Reminders "Shopping" list.

Sidebar: The hardest part in my Emacs learning has been finding a good reference flow for Emacs / library API's. I know I can look things up in Emacs with C-h, but if I don't know what to look up, then I end up online and searching around aimlessly. This Org Element API is quite helpful, but I wish I knew how to 'discover' it in Emacs, and I still wish it were better organized and more detailed (without being able to put my finger on what exactly I feel like I'm missing).

The script:

(defun my-add-org-items-to-shopping-reminders ()
  "Extract all list items from the current Org buffer and add them to the 'Shopping' list in Apple Reminders."
  (interactive)
  (require 'org-element)
  ;; Extract all list items
  (let ((parsed (org-element-parse-buffer))
        (items '()))
    (org-element-map parsed 'item
      (lambda (item)
        (let ((content (org-element-property :contents-begin item))
              (end (org-element-property :contents-end item)))
          (when (and content end)
            (push (buffer-substring-no-properties content end) items)))))
    ;; Add each item to Apple Reminders
    (dolist (item (reverse items))
      (let ((as-command (format
                         "tell application \"Reminders\"
                            tell list \"Shopping\"
                              make new reminder with properties {name:\"%s\"}
                            end tell
                          end tell"
                         item)))
        (message "Adding to Reminders: %s" item)  ;; Debug
        (shell-command (format "osascript -e '%s'" as-command)))))
  (message "All items added to the 'Shopping' list."))

Now, I have a new routine:

1. Make the Meal Plan in Notion as usual, with the lists of items we need to get at the store:

2. Copy the entire Notion page and paste it into an Emacs buffer (even *scratch* works for this):

3. Convert Notion's Markdown into Org⁴

4. Run the command to send the list items to Apple Reminders:

5. Go shopping! 🛒