gcalcli: An interface to the cloud

I am not a big fan of cloud technology; I am quite sure that, at some point in the future, the rush to dump information in the hands of offsite corporate hosts is going to backfire. (If it hasn’t already.)

On the other hand, my current job relies a lot on Google Calendar, to synchronize schedules between staff members.

So I use it, but do my best to insulate my personal life from the stuff on the web. Call me paranoid; I don’t mind.

gcalcli is one way to interact with the calendar service, and it’s not as cumbersome as it might appear at first.

In the lower right corner you can see the output of gcalcli, showing a list of calendars. (And yes, that is tmux and not screen running. I am trying to widen my horizons. 🙂 )

Most of the features and protocol for gcalcli are easy to figure out, from the help page. My only suggestion is to use gpg to store your password locally, and set up the gcalcli configuration file to decrypt it on access.

The -help flag gives a little information about that, in short:

1. type your password into a text file,
2. encrypt it with gpg -c passwd.txt,
3. adjust your .gcalclirc file to

[gcalcli]
user: kmandla
pw: `gpg --decrypt passwd.txt.gpg`

In my case, because I run without X, I had to add this to .gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses

and --use-agent to the gpg commands, both before and in .gcalclirc.

I’ll say after all, that while this is useful, I still prefer to simply export the calendar through Google’s interface, and convert them with ical2rem.py. Remember that one? 😉