calendarender

These are 2 scripts for calendaring in plantext files.

calendar.txt shows the current day at the top and continues down as far as the number of months you have rendered.

calendar_archive.txt contains all the days before current day.

calendar.txt looks like this:

☼ sun nov 29
water plants
coop fed meeting


◯ mon nov 30
recycling


———— December ————

☼ tue dec 01
reading group


☼ wed dec 02
1pm appointment


⇃◌ thu dec 03
open hours at lab

installation + configuration

clone or download the repo.
configure calendarender by opening calendarender.sh in your texteditor of choice and modify the line:

calendarFile="/Users/YOU/WHEREYOURNOTESARE/calendar.txt"

to say where your calendar file is. This must be the absolute path to your calendar file. If you don't have one just make an empty txt file there to start.

You might also like to configure recurring events. Recurring events really ought to be in a separate config file but currently they are hardcoded within the program itself. To add recurring events go down to where it says ############# render weekly things. This section is broken down by day. There are a number of examples for Sundays that you can look at and modify for different days of the week/month. Anything in quotes after echo will be added to the calendar.

  #every sunday
  if [ "$dayOfWeek" = "Sun" ]; then echo "water plants">> $calendarFile; sunday=$(($sunday+1)); fi

Make sure not to get rid of the section sunday=$(($sunday+1)) because that is how the program keeps track of which sunday/monday/tuesday/(etc) we're on.

 #second sunday
 if [ "$dayOfWeek" = "Sun" ] && [ "$sunday" -eq 2 ]; then echo "example potluck">> $calendarFile; fi

copy this to another day and change Sun, sunday, and sunday to that day. The 2 indicates this will be on the second sunday

  #last sunday
  if [ "$(date -v1d -v+"$tooFarNum"m -v-1d -v-sun +%a-%b-%d)" = "$(date -v1d -v+"$1"m -v+"$PLACEINMONTH"d +%a-%b-%d)" ] && [ "$dayOfWeek" = "Sun" ]; then echo "last sunday of the month potluck">> $calendarFile; fi

this one is a liiiitle more complicated but you can copy and paste this one to create events on the last monday/tuesday/etc of the month. Just change "Sun" to a different day of the week

configure calendarchive

Within calendarchive.sh, find the lines:

calendarFile="/Users/YOU/YOURNOTESFOLDER/calendar.txt"

calendarchive="/Users/YOU/YOURNOTESFOLDER/calendar_archive.txt"

and modify them to point to your calendar files. Make sure both those exist at least as blank files.

you might need to chmod +x each of the scripts to make sure they're executable.
You can now just run them with sh calendarchive.sh or sh calendarender.sh but they're easier to use if they're in your path:

Copy the scripts somewhere like ~/bin and add export PATH=$PATH:~/bin to ~/.bashrc

usage

My personal notes folder is plain text synced between machines with SyncThing and edited via Notational Velocity or TextEdit or Gedit, etc. I keep calendar.txt, calendar_archive.txt and all sorts of other notes in there. I've been calendaring this way since fall of 2019.

calendarender

calendarender takes one argument and that's the number of months in the future you'd like to render. So say it's currently some day in November and I want to add the days in January to my calendar.txt, I would run calendarender 2. It'll print to the terminal as well as to the file.

calendarender also prints relevant moon phases: new, full, crescents and halfs. On any day that isn't one of those phases a sun is printed. If it's waxing an up-arrow will be printed, waning, down-arrow. It's not the most accurate moon-phase algorithm but close enough for me :)

calendarchive

if you run calendarchive without any arguments it will remove all days from calendar.txt that are before the current day and append them to the bottom of calendar_archive.txt. If it's late at night but before midnight you can run calendarchive 1 and it'll also archive today as well (this doesn't work on linux though because of differences in how the date program works. Oh well.).

you could cron calendarchive to have it automatically run but personally I keep all kinds of notes and things in my calendar and don't want to lose track of anything. So I manually run calendarchive.