At the Command Line

The ability to query at the command line lets you look up tasks, appointments, and events on the fly. By linking Calcurse with a script or an entry in /etc/crontab, you can automate queries and thus output reminders.

Table 1 gives details of the switches supported by Calcurse. The man page and the detailed documentation list additional parameters. In the program, you can always access the built-in help by pressing ?.

The example in Listing 1 retrieves the entries for the next 10 days. In the output, you will see the data for a single entry on 17 February 2014, which points to an event named B20 Knowledge Space: Marked. YubiKey NEO NFC authentication day in conjunction with a smartphone. The event starts at 7:00pm, ends at 8:00pm, and takes place at the corporate offices.

Data Storage

Calcurse stores the data locally in your home directory below .calcurse/. Table 2 explains the function of the individual plain-text files.

If you want to use a different calendar or save the data to another location on your computer, you need to tell Calcurse by using one of the two switches: -c <file> or -d <directory> The corresponding long options are called --calendar and --directory. With the former, you only specify a different calendar file, whereas the latter specifies a different directory in which Calcurse then stores the data. Currently, you cannot use both at the same time.

Import and Export

For simplicity, Calcurse stores all entries in plain text – with a date and an entry in each line. It also supports the import and export formats iCalendar version 2.0 (as per RFC 2445 [3]) and PCAL [4]. Because iCalendar is the standard for exchanging calendar data, you can thus exchange appointments with many popular applications on multiple platforms.

The development team is working on full integration of the format. Currently, the software only supports a subset. Among the features not supported in particular is the ability to handle different time zones.

Many websites offer dates for events in iCalendar format. If you have an appointment of this kind, like the example in Listing 2, event.ics, you can import the appointment with the -i option (long form: --import).

If you want to read or export an appointment in interactive mode, use i (import) and x (export). You can do this not only for individual items but also for entire months and task lists. To do so, first press Tab to move to the corresponding window or select an entry.

Pressing the keys mentioned above will take you to a menu at the bottom of the window, in which you can choose between the iCalendar and PCAL formats. Then, specify a file name to view the appointment available after importing into Calcurse or make it available for other programs by exporting to a file.