wyrd: Putting a face on remind

I have a little advice if you’re a budding programmer, and your goal is to come up with some sort of console-based scheduling tool: You’d better be serious.

Mostly because you’re already up against some incredible competition. I’ve mentioned an awful lot of task organizers over the past few months, but there’s one that always leaves me befuddled and awestruck: remind.

I don’t pretend to know everything about every little reminder tool out there, but just looking at the man page should give you an idea how complex and intricate remind is.

But I’ll be honest: Something this detailed is usually overkill for me. I’m not a corporate executive, I don’t have conflicting seminars to juggle, and I don’t manage a vast IT staff.

So all the scheduling formulas, nested reminders and so forth … much as I’d like to, I’ll just never get around to trying them.

On the other hand, wyrd takes all that and makes it manageable.

Quick keystrokes for adding timed and nonrepeating events, weekly and monthly overviews, event templates, vi-like navigation … the list goes on.

And really, aside from making the adding and management of events easier, wyrd just looks good.

It has a good default color scheme, a pleasant spatial arrangement, keeps a full calendar on-screen at all times, and can be stretched or pressed to almost any dimension in your terminal.

You do need a little proficiency with remind’s protocol, but it is very intuitive, and for most commonplace scheduling events, it is quite obvious. You can do the basics without even trying.

These two programs by themselves are winners; as a team they’re probably the pinnacle of calendar control at the text-only level. Getting to know them is highly recommended.