Calendaring is messy. You have one-time events, repeating events, all-day events, event locations, event attendees, time zones, alarms, and so on. To manage this complexity, you need an equally complex calendar application. For basic use, I get by (I actually use Apple’s iOS and OS X apps), but sometimes I need something more basic.
One situation in which almost every calendar application will make things difficult is making a calendar for a class I’m teaching. It would be difficult to create an event for each class meeting, with the topic we will discuss in the description of each event. It would be even harder when, five classes in, I decide we need to do something different one day and thus shift the topic of every remaining class back by one day.
Another situation is managing birthdays. I have a very large family (more than 70 if you count only siblings, in-laws, and their children) and would like to keep track of their birthdays (and ages if possible). At first this seems like a good use of a standard calendar app because you only have to enter something when someone new joins the family. Ages are harder, but you can just put the birth year in the event and do some subtraction. The problem is that I sometimes forget to add someone and it is impossible to notice until next year. Before I know it, I only have the birthdays of half of my nephews under 5, and I have no way of knowing (besides exhaustive search) which ones I am missing.
What I need is some kind of markdown for calendars. A plain text way to manage dates. Not for all my events, because my apps work well under most circumstances. I just need something for edge cases.
Of course, calendars can be exchanged via the iCalendar format, which is plain text (not related to Apple’s iCal Mac app). But this is a complicated format with the ability to do every crazy thing that I imagine CEOs make their secretaries do. It is not meant to be managed by hand.
Here is where a Perl script named when comes in. From the project website:
When is an extremely simple personal calendar program, aimed at the Unix geek who wants something minimalistic.
Count me in.
If you are using OS X and homebrew, you can install it with brew install when. It has no dependencies, so you could almost as easily install it yourself. (By install I mean “copy to your computer”, assuming you have Perl. Speaking of which, how is it possible that Windows doesn’t ship with Perl, Python, and Ruby? Man, I could never go back.)
When reads events stored in a plain text file. Each event is a single line, and repeating events are defined using either cron-like syntax (2012 * 01) or equations (y=2012 & d=1). It is efficient, Unix-y and beautiful. If you stick to the cron-like syntax, sorting the lines alphabetically sorts events chronologically, to the extent that repeating events can be sorted.
There is a special syntax for annual repeats that allows you to reference the year. So
1932* 06 10, Pierre Cartier (\a)
creates a repeating event, and the when utility calculates the age like this:
$ when
Thu 2012 Jun 7 6:31
Sun 2012 Jun 10 Pierre Cartier (80)
This is a perfect solution to my birthday problem. Family members can be sorted by age, which makes it easy to tell who needs added. It would be simple to convert the file to a basic iCalendar file which I could subscribe to in iCal or my parents could subscribe to in Google.
This would make a class calendar much easier also.