Table of Contents
calcurse [-h|-v] [-an] [-t[num]] [-c<file>] [-D<dir>]
[-i<file>] [-x[format]] [-d <date>|<num>]
[-s[date]] [-r[range]] [-S <regex>] [--status]
Calcurse is a text-based calendar and scheduling application. It helps keeping track of events, appointments and everyday tasks. A configurable notification system reminds user of upcoming deadlines, and the curses based interface can be customized to suit user needs. All of the commands are documented within an online help system.
The following options are supported:
Print the appointments for the given date or for the given number of upcoming days, depending on the argument format. Two possible formats are supported:
In the first case, the appointment list for the specified date will be returned, while in the second case the appointment list for the n upcoming days will be returned.
As an example, typing calcurse -d 3 will display your appointments for today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.
The date format used is the one specified in the “General options” menu. Four formats are available:
Note: as for the -a flag, the calendar from which to read the appointments can be specified using the -c flag.
Print the next appointment within upcoming 24 hours and exit. The indicated time is the number of hours and minutes left before this appointment.
Note: the calendar from which to read the appointments can be specified using the -c flag.
Don’t save configuration nor appointments/todos.
Warning: Use this this with care! If you run an interactive calcurse instance in read-only mode, all changes from this session will be lost without warning!
Export user data to specified format. Events, appointments and todos are converted and echoed to stdout. Two possible formats are available: ical and pcal. If the optional argument format is not given, ical format is selected by default.
Note: redirect standard output to export data to a file, by issuing a command such as:
$ calcurse --export > my_data.dat
Note: The -N option has been removed in calcurse 3.0.0. See the FORMAT STRINGS section on how to print note along with appointments and events.
Format strings are composed of printf()-style format specifiers — ordinary characters are copied to stdout without modification. Each specifier is introduced by a % and is followed by a character which specifies the field to print. The set of available fields depends on the item type.
calcurse -r7 --format-apt='- %S -> %E\n\t%m\n%N'
calcurse -r7 --format-apt=' - %m (%S to %E)\n' --format-recur-apt=' - %m (%S to %E)\n'
calcurse -t --format-todo '(%p) %m\n'
Extended format specifiers can be used if you want to specify advanced formatting options. Extended specifiers are introduced by %( and are terminated by a closing parenthesis ()). The following list includes all short specifiers and corresponding long options:
The (start) and (end) specifiers support strftime()-style extended formatting options that can be used for fine-grained formatting. Additionally, the special formats epoch (which is equivalent to (start:%s) or (end:%s)) and default (which is mostly equivalent to (start:%H:%M) or (end:%H:%M) but displays ..:.. if the item doesn’t start/end at the current day) are supported.
Calcurse interface contains three different panels (calendar, appointment list, and todo list) on which you can perform different actions. All the possible actions, together with their associated keystrokes, are listed on the status bar. This status bar takes place at the bottom of the screen.
At any time, the built-in help system can be invoked by pressing the ? key. Once viewing the help screens, informations on a specific command can be accessed by pressing the keystroke corresponding to that command.
The calcurse options can be changed from the configuration menu (shown when C is hit). Five possible categories are to be chosen from : the color scheme, the layout (the location of the three panels on the screen), notification options, key bindings configuration menu, and more general options (such as automatic save before quitting). All of these options are detailed in the configuration menu.
The following structure is created in your $HOME directory (or in the directory you specified with the -D option), the first time calcurse is run:
$HOME/.calcurse/
|___notes/
|___conf
|___keys
|___apts
|___todoThe notes subdirectory contains descriptions of the notes which are attached to appointments, events or todos. One text file is created per note, whose name is built using mkstemp(3) and should be unique, but with no relation with the corresponding item’s description.
The conf file contains the user configuration. The keys file contains the user-defined key bindings. The apts file contains all of the user’s appointments and events, and the todo file contains the todo list.
Note: if the logging of calcurse daemon activity was set in the notification configuration menu, the extra file daemon.log will appear in calcurse data directory. This file contains logs about calcurse activity when running in background.
This section describes the environment variables that affect how calcurse operates.
Incorrect highlighting of items appear when using calcurse black and white theme together with a $TERM variable set to xterm-color. To fix this bug, and as advised by Thomas E. Dickey (xterm maintainer), xterm-xfree86 should be used instead of xterm-color to set the $TERM variable:
"The xterm-color value for $TERM is a bad choice for XFree86 xterm because it is commonly used for a terminfo entry which happens to not support bce. Use the xterm-xfree86 entry which is distributed with XFree86 xterm (or the similar one distributed with ncurses)."
If you find other bugs, please send a report to bugs@calcurse.org or to one of the authors, below.
vi(1), less(1), ncurses(3), mkstemp(3)
The ical specification (rfc2445) can be found at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445
The pcal project page: http://pcal.sourceforge.net/
Calcurse home page: http://calcurse.org/
Calcurse complete manual, translated in many languages and maintained in html format, can be found in the doc/ directory of the source package, or at: http://calcurse.org/files/manual.html