clcal: Low-maintenance calendar display

I found clcal by accident the other day, while trying to track down something called lcal, which may or may not exist as an independent project.

clcal is different to me, in that it seems to be little more than a tool to prettify flat calendar event files.

I’ll show you this screenshot, then try to explain.

Seems that clcal is hard-wired to skim through a folder called .calendar, then through subfolders for years and months, then read text files named for days.

You can see that there, with the tree structure for the .calendar folder at the top of the screenshot. I made those files manually. clcal didn’t.

The results of clcal’s adventure are spat out on the screen, with formatting to keep days and events cleanly separated and highlighted.

This too you can see above.

But after that … I think that’s all clcal does. It has some fundamental range limiters, a search function and one or two other small frills.

Very basic, very clean. I like it.

I also like that it has potential. Keeping calendar events in text files means it may be possible to dump events from other utilities into nested folders, and rely on clcal to watch them.

pal comes to mind for that. As do a couple of graphical event managers.

It also means you’re not really limited to calendar events here. If you have other notes or reminders that lend themselves to simple text files, clcal might be good for displaying them.

And if you can’t stand captive applications that tie up your tty and prevent you from roaming free at the keyboard, this might be preferable too. 😐