Hey all,
I’m a big fan of my plain text and terminal -based applications for things, and I’m looking a calendar system in this spirit. I’d like for a system which:
- If possible, is stored in a plain-text (human-readable) format (a la calendar.txt)
- Has some way of managing repeating events/automating some of the process (which is my only problem with calendar.txt)
- Can be accessed on my phone (an iPhone—yes yes, I know, I can sense everyone’s disappointment) while on the go (either through some application, or just through a plain text editor)
For the past month or two, I’ve been using remind, which, while fantastic in features and usage, seems relatively obscure and unsupported, and the file format isn’t as human-readable as I’d prefer (take this slightly modified excerpt from my class schedule):
OMIT 2024-11-25 THROUGH 2024-11-29 MSG Thanksgiving Break
REM Tue Thu FROM 2024-08-19 UNTIL 2024-12-20 SKIP AT 09:05 DURATION [1:15] MSG Class 1
REM Tue Thu FROM 2024-08-19 UNTIL 2024-12-20 SKIP AT 10:40 DURATION [0:50] MSG Class 2
REM Tue Thu FROM 2024-08-19 UNTIL 2024-12-20 SKIP AT 12:00 DURATION [1:15] MSG Class 3
I recently heard about calcure, which I’m very curious about, as the interface seems (quite frankly) a bit nicer than wyrd, which is what I’ve been using for remind—but is there an easy way to interface locally with .ics files on an iPhone?
For my to-dos, I’ve been pretty happy with the todo.txt format, and with topydo and todooo as frontends for it—surely there is something like this, but for calendar events?
P.S.—Before someone mentions it, yes, I am familiar with org-mode, and I know it perfectly fits my bill, and perhaps it is what I will ultimately turn to—but I’d strongly prefer not to, as I’m currently rebelling against Emacs, and we all know how poorly implemented org is outside of it.
cal
[Goofy reference to goofy thing https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html ] Something tells me that cal is the standard text-based calendar 😅
Hawk TUI, ncurses on that thing
Khal is a nice tui calendar, maybe not for your needs like calendar.txt
I ended up using Khal too. Hesitant at first, it wound up being good enough for me, especially when it comes to mass importing events. It syncs with my CalDav and phone when using vdirsyncer. 5 to 10 minutes fiddling with the config and haven’t needed to change anything in years.
Khal is also my app of choice for calendars, though it may not suit OP requirements since files are .ics Everything is kept in sync on my phone with Etar and DavX5.
Note that khal itself is the CLI aspect. It’s interactive interface (ikhal) is really the TUI aspect of this app.
ikhal is great to manage events but I prefer to use the command-line to create events. And this is the only minor complaint I have against khal: its lengthy commands and lack of user friendly dates support (like “today”, “next mon”…). Luckily all of that is easily fixable with a script which I should upload on my codeberg one day… I actually ended up adding edition and deletion support using (neo)vim and fzf so I don’t use ikhal anymore but only creating events is really faster and easier with my script compare to using ikhal.
Everything except mobile support points towards Emacs org-mode indeed.
If you can find something even close to it, I would be interested to know as well.
