Calcurse requires only a C compiler, such as cc or gcc, and the ncurses library. It would be very surprising not to have a valid ncurses library already installed on your computer, but if not, you can find it at the following url: http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses/

calcurse supports internationalization (i18n hereafter) through the gettext utilities. This means calcurse can produce multi-lingual messages if compiled with native language support (i.e. NLS).

However, NLS is optionnal and if you do not want to have support for multi-lingual messages, you can disable this feature. This is done by giving the --disable-nls option to configure (see section Install process). To check if the gettext utilities are installed on your system, you can search for the libintl.h header file for instance:

$ locate libintl.h

If this header file is not found, then you can obtain the gettext sources at the following url : http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gettext/

calcurse takes the following options from the command line (both short and long options are supported):

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 can be compiled with native language support (see gettext library). Thus, if you wish to have messages displayed into your native language, first make sure it is available by looking at the po/LINGUAS file. This file indicates the set of available languages by showing the two-letters corresponding code (for exemple, fr stands for french). If you do not find your language, it would be greatly appreciated if you could help translating calcurse (see the How to contribute? section).

If your language is available, run calcurse with the following command:

$ LC_ALL=fr_FR calcurse

You should also specify the charset to be used, because in some cases the accents and such are not displayed correctly. This charset is indicated at the beginning of the po file corresponding to the desired language. For instance, you can see in the fr.po file that it uses the iso-8859-1 charset, so you could run calcurse using the following command:

$ LC_ALL=fr_FR.ISO8859-1 calcurse

The following environment variables affect the way calcurse operates:

When called with at least one of the following arguments: -a, -d, -h, -n, -t, -v, -x, calcurse is started in non-interactive mode. This means the desired information will be displayed, and after that, calcurse simply quits and you are driven back to the shell prompt.

That way, one can add a line such as calcurse --todo --appointment in its init config file to display at logon the list of tasks and appointments scheduled for the current day.

When called without any argument or only with the -c option, calcurse is started in interactive mode. In this mode, you are shown an interface containing three different panels which you can browse using the TAB key, plus a notification bar and a status bar (see figure below).

 appointment panel---.                                   .---calendar panel
                     |                                   |
                     v                                   v
 +------------------------------------++----------------------------+
 |          Appointments              ||          Calendar          |
 |------------------------------------||----------------------------|
 |                 (|)  April 6, 2006 ||         April 2006         |
 |                                    ||Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun |
 |                                    ||                      1   2 |
 |                                    ||  3   4   5   6   7   8   9 |
 |                                    || 10  11  12  13  14  15  16 |
 |                                    || 17  18  19  20  21  22  23 |
 |                                    || 24  25  26  27  28  29  30 |
 |                                    ||                            |
 |                                    |+----------------------------+
 |                                    |+----------------------------+
 |                                    ||            ToDo            | todo
 |                                    ||----------------------------| panel
 |                                    ||                            |   |
 |                                    ||                            |   |
 |                                    ||                            |<--.
 |                                    ||                            |
 +------------------------------------++----------------------------+
 |---[ Mon 2006-11-22 | 10:11:43 ]---(apts)----> 01:20 :: lunch <---|<--.
 +------------------------------------------------------------------+ notify-bar
 | ? Help     R Redraw    H/L -/+1 Day      G GoTo       C Config   |
 | Q Quit     S Save      J/K -/+1 Week   Tab Chg View              |<-.
 +------------------------------------------------------------------+  |
                                                                       |
                                                                 status bar

The first panel represents a calendar which allows to highlight a particular day, the second one contains the list of the events and appointments on that day, and the last one contains a list of tasks to do but which are not assigned to any specific day.

Depending on the selected view, the calendar could either display a monthly (default as shown in previous figure) or weekly view. The weekly view would look like the following:

+------------------------------------+
|              Calendar              |
|----------------------------(# 13)--|
|    Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun     |
|     29  30  31  01  02  03  04     |
|                               <----+--  slice 1: 00:00 to 04:00 AM
|       --  --  --  --  --  --       |
|                               <----+--  slice 2: 04:00 to 08:00 AM
|       --  --  --  --  --  --       |
|                               <----+--  slice 3: 08:00 to 12:00 AM
|    -  --  --  --  --  --  --  -  <-+--  midday
|                               <----+--  slice 4: 12:00 to 04:00 PM
|       --  --  --  --  --  --       |
|                               <----+--  slice 5: 04:00 to 08:00 PM
|       --  --  --  --  --  --       |
|                               <----+--  slice 6: 08:00 to 12:00 PM
+------------------------------------+

The current week number is displayed on the top-right side of the panel (# 13 meaning it is the 13th week of the year in the above example). The seven days of the current week are displayed in column. Each day is divided into slices of 4 hours each (6 slices in total, see figure above). A slice will appear in a different color if an appointment falls into the corresponding time-slot.

In the appointment panel, one can notice the (|) sign just in front of the date. This indicates the current phase of the moon. Depending on which is the current phase, the following signs can be seen:

At the very bottom of the screen there is a status bar, which indicates the possible actions and the corresponding keystrokes.

Just above this status bar is the notify-bar, which indicates from left to right : the current date, the current time, the calendar file currently in use (apts on the above example, which is the default calendar file, see the following section), and the next appointment within the upcoming 24 hours. Here it says that it will be lunch time in one hour and twenty minutes.

Within this editor, if a line is longer than the screen width, a >, *, or < character is displayed in the last column indicating that there are more character after, before and after, or before the current position, respectively. The line is scrolled horizontally as necessary.

Moreover, some editing commands are bound to particular control characters. Hereafter are indicated the available editing commands (^ stands for the control key):

Data in icalendar format as described in the rfc2445 specification (see links section below) can be imported into calcurse. Calcurse ical parser is based on version 2.0 of this specification, but for now on, only a subset of it is supported.

The following icalendar properties are handled by calcurse:

The icalendar DESCRIPTION property will be converted into calcurse format by adding a note to the item. If a "VALARM" property is found, the item will be flagged as important and the user will get a notification (this is only applicable to appointments).

Here are the properties that are not implemented:

Two possible export formats are available: ical and pcal (see section Links below to find out about those formats).

To be able to display texts in the native language of the user, two steps are required: internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n).

i18n is about making calcurse support multiple languages. It is performed by coders, who will mark translatable texts and provide a way to display them translated at runtime.

l10n is about making the i18n’ed calcurse adapt to the specific language of the user, ie translating the strings previously marked by the developers, and setting the environment correctly for calcurse to use the result of this translation.

So, translatable strings are first marked by the coders within the C source files, then gathered in a template file (calcurse.pot - the pot extension meaning portable object template). The content of this template file is then merged with the translation files for each language (fr.po for French, for instance - with po standing for portable object, ie meant to be read and edited by humans). A given translation team will take this file, translate its strings, and send it back to the developers. At compilation time, a binary version of this file (for efficiency reasons) will be produced (fr.mo - mo stands for machine object, i.e. meant to be read by programs), and then installed. Then calcurse will use this file at runtime, translating the strings according to the locale settings of the user.

Suppose someone wants to initiate the translation of a new language. Here are the steps to follow:

Now, having this fr.po file, the translator is ready to begin.

The format of the po-files is quite simple. Indeed, po-files are made of four things:

Basically, all you have to do is fill the msgstr lines with the translation of the above msgid line.

A few notes:

There’s several different ways to upload a finished (or semi-finished) translation for a new language to Transifex. The easiest way is to browse to the Translation Teams page and request the addition of a new team.

As soon as we accepted your request, you will be able to upload your po file on the calcurse resource page by clicking the Add translation button at the bottom.

You can also use a command line client to submit translations instead of having to use the web interface every time you want to submit an updated version. If you have a recent version of setuptools installed, you can get the CLI client by issuing the following command:

$ easy_install -U transifex-client

Alternatively, you can get the source code of transifex-client at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/transifex-client.

After you downloaded and installed the client, run the following commands in the calcurse source directory to checkout the translation resources of calcurse:

$ tx pull -a

To submit changes back to the server, use:

$ tx push -r calcurse.calcursepot -t -l <locale>

For more details, read up on transifex-client usage at the The Transifex Command-line Client v0.4 section of the Transifex documentation.

As an alternative to editing po files, there is a web-based interface that can be used to create and update translations. After having signed up and created a new translation team (see Uploading to Transifex on how to do that), click the Add translation button at the bottom on the calcurse resource page, select the language you’d like to translate and choose Translate Online.