In today’s highly connected world it’s often useful to keep track of time in several time zones. I work in a company with employees all over the world, so I probably keep track of more time zones than most people.

So, what are the best ways to do this? I know what you’re thinking - let’s just buy an Omega Aqua Terra Worldtimer mechanical watch for $10,000 and be done with it!1 While this will definitely get the job done and improve the looks of your wrist immensely, there’s a cheaper and more practical option for you - Emacs. Did you know that Emacs has a command named world-clock that does exactly what we want?2 If you invoke it you’ll see something like this:

Seattle   Monday 11 March 02:45 PDT
New York  Monday 11 March 05:45 EDT
London    Monday 11 March 09:45 GMT
Paris     Monday 11 March 10:45 CET
Bangalore Monday 11 March 15:15 IST
Tokyo     Monday 11 March 18:45 JST

Hmm, looks OK but the greatest city in the world (Sofia, Bulgaria) is missing from the list… That’s totally unacceptable! We can fix this by tweaking the variable world-clock-list:

(setq world-clock-list
      '(("America/Los_Angeles" "Seattle")
        ("America/New_York" "New York")
        ("Europe/London" "London")
        ("Europe/Paris" "Paris")
        ("Europe/Sofia" "Sofia")
        ("Asia/Calcutta" "Bangalore")
        ("Asia/Tokyo" "Tokyo")))

Let’s try M-x world-clock again now:

Seattle      Monday 11 March 02:51 PDT
New York     Monday 11 March 05:51 EDT
London       Monday 11 March 09:51 GMT
Paris        Monday 11 March 10:51 CET
Sofia        Monday 11 March 11:51 EET
Bangalore    Monday 11 March 15:21 IST
Tokyo        Monday 11 March 18:51 JST

Much better!

By the way, you don’t really have to edit world-clock-list, as by default it’s configured to mirror the value of zoneinfo-style-world-list. The choice is yours.

You can also configure the way the world time entries are displayed using world-clock-time-format. Let’s switch to a style with shorter day and month names:

(setq world-clock-time-format "%a %d %b %R %Z")

This will result in:

Seattle      Mon 11 Mar 06:06 PDT
New York     Mon 11 Mar 09:06 EDT
London       Mon 11 Mar 13:06 GMT
Paris        Mon 11 Mar 14:06 CET
Sofia        Mon 11 Mar 15:06 EET
Bangalore    Mon 11 Mar 18:36 IST
Tokyo        Mon 11 Mar 22:06 JST

Check out the docstring of format-time-string (C-h f format-time-string) for more details, as the options here are numerous.

That’s all I have for you today. I hope you learned something useful. Keep hacking!

  1. Mechanical watches are another passion of mine. ↩

  2. It was named display-time-world before Emacs 28.1. The command was originally introduced in Emacs 23.1. ↩