NAME
When - a minimalistic personal calendar program
SYNOPSIS
when
when [options] [commands]
COMMANDS
i Print upcoming items on your calendar. (This is the default
command.)
c Print calendars for last month, this month, and next month.
e Invoke your favorite editor to edit your calendar file.
w,m,y Print items for the coming week, month, or year, rather than
for the default period of two weeks.
j Print the modified Julian day (useful for finding the time
interval between two dates).
d Print nothing but the current date.
OPTIONS
All of the following options, except --help, can be set in the
preferences file. True/false options can be set on the command line as
--option or --nooption, and in the preferences file by setting option
to 0 or 1.
--help Prints a brief help message.
--version
Prints a brief message, including a statement of what version
of the software it is.
--language=LANG
Set the language to LANG. See the section below on
internationalization. This option is not normally needed,
because the language is automatically detected.
--past=DAYS
How many days into the past the report extends. Default: -1
--future=DAYS
How many days into the past the report extends. Default: 14
--calendar=FILE
Your calendar file. The default is to use the file pointed to
by your preferences file, which is set up the first time you
run When.
--editor=COMMAND
Command used to invoke your editor. Default: "emacs -nw"
Example: when --editor="vim"
--wrap=COLUMNS
Number of columns of text for the output (or 0 if you don’t
want wrapping at all). Default: 80
--[no]wrap_auto
Attempt to detect the width of the terminal, and set the width
of the output accordingly. This applies only if the output is a
tty, and is subject to any maximum set by --wrap_max. Overrides
any value set by --wrap. Default: no
--wrap_max=COLUMNS
Maximum number of columns of text for the output (or -1 if you
don’t want any maximum). Useful in combination with --wrap_auto
to preserve legibility on very large terminal windows. Default:
-1
--rows=COLUMNS
Number of rows of text that will fit in the terminal window.
When listing your calendar, output will be truncated to this
length, unless that would result in listing less than three
days into the future. This behavior is overridden (the maximum
number of rows is set to infinity) if the --future option is
given explicitly on the command line, or if the m or y command
is used. Default: 40
--[no]rows_auto
Attempt to detect the height of the terminal, rather than using
the value set in the --rows option. This applies only if the
output is a tty. Overrides any value set by --rows. Default:
yes
--[no]paging
When the output is longer than the value set by rows or
rows_auto, use a pager to display the output. (The PAGER and
LESS environment variables are respected. If PAGER isn’t set,
the default is "less.") Default: yes
--paging_less_options
Extra options if the pager is "less." Default: "-rXFE"
--[no]filter_accents_on_output
Whether to change accented characters to unaccented ones.
Default: yes, unless the $TERM environment variable equals
"mlterm" or "xterm".
--[no]styled_output
If the output is a terminal, should we use ANSI terminal codes
for styling? Default: yes
--[no]styled_output_if_not_tty
Style the output even if it’s not a terminal. Default: no
--calendar_today_style=STYLE
How to style today’s date when doing the calendar (c) command.
Default: bold
--items_today_style=STYLE
How to style the word ‘‘today’’ when doing the items (i)
command. Default: bold
--now="Y M D"
Pretend today is some other date.
--[no]monday_first
Start the week from Monday, rather than Sunday. Default: no
--[no]orthodox_easter
Calculate Easter according to the Orthodox Eastern Church’s
calendar. Default: no
--[no]ampm
Display the time of day using 12-hour time, rather than 24-hour
time. Default: yes
--test_expression
Used internally by ‘make test’.
--bare_version
Used internally by the Makefile.
--make_filter_regex
Used internally.
--test_accent_filtering
Used internally.
The styling of output can be specified using the following keywords:
bold, underlined, flashing. To change the color of the text, use
these: fgblack, fgred, fggreen, fgyellow, fgblue, fgpurple, fgcyan,
fgwhite. To change the background color, use similar keywords, but
with bg instead of fg. Example: when
--calendar_today_style="bold,fgred,bgcyan" c
DESCRIPTION
When is an extremely simple personal calendar program, aimed at the
Unix geek who wants something minimalistic. It can keep track of things
you need to do on particular dates. There are a lot of calendar and
‘‘personal information manager’’ programs out there, so what reasons
are there to use When?
It’s a very short and simple program, so you can easily tinker with it
yourself.
It doesn’t depend on any libraries, so it’s easy to install. You should
be able to install it on any system where Perl is available, even if
you don’t have privileges for installing libraries.
Its file format is a simple text file, which you can edit in your
favorite editor.
Although When should run on virtually any operating system where Perl
is available, in this document I’ll assume you’re running some flavor
of Unix.
INSTALLATION AND GETTING STARTED
While logged in as root, execute the following command:
make install
Run When for the first time using this command:
when
You’ll be prompted for some information needed to set up your calendar
file.
USE
If you run When again after the initial setup run, it should print out
a single line of text, telling you the current date. It won’t print out
anything else, because your calendar file is empty, so you don’t have
any appointments coming up.
Now you can start putting items in your calendar file. Each item is a
line of text that looks like this:
2003 feb 3 , Fly to Stockholm to accept Nobel Prize.
A convenient way to edit your calendar file is with this command:
when e
This pops you into your favorite editor (the one you chose when you ran
When for the first time).
The date has to be in year-month-day format, but you can either spell
the month or give it as a number. (Month names are case-insensitive,
and it doesn’t matter if you represent February as F, Fe, Feb, Februa,
or whatever. It just has to be a unique match. You can give a trailing
., which will be ignored. In Czech, "cer" can be used as an
abbreviation for Cerven, and "cec" for Cervenec.) Extra whitespace is
ignored until you get into the actual text after the comma. Blank lines
and lines beginning with a # sign are ignored.
For events that occur once a year, such as birthdays and annivesaries,
you can either use a * in place of the year,
* dec 25 , Christmas
or use a year with an asterisk:
1920* aug 29 , Charlie Parker turns \a, born in \y
In the second example, \a tells you how old Charlie Parker would be
this year, and \y reproduces the year he was born, i.e., the output
would be:
today 2003 Aug 29 Charlie Parker turns 83, born in 1920
For things you have to do every week, you can use an expression of the
form w=xxx, where xxx is the first few letters of the name of the day
of the week in your language. (You have to supply enough letters to
eliminate ambiguity, e.g., in English, w=th or w=tu, not just w=t.)
Example:
w=sun , go to church, 10:00
You can actually do fancier tests than this as well; for more
information, see the section ’fancy tests’ below.
If you now run When, it will print out a list of all the items in your
calendar file that fall within a certain time interval. (The interval
starts from yesterday. When tries to pick the end of the time interval
so that its output fits on your terminal window, but it will always be
at least three days, and no more than two weeks in the future.) To see
all your items for the next month, do ‘‘when m’’, and similarly for a
year, y, or a single week, w.
If you do ‘‘when c’’, When prints out calendars for last month, this
month, and next month.
You can combine these commands. For instance, ‘‘when cw’’ will print
out calendars, and then show you your items for the next week.
INTERNATIONALIZATION
When has at least partial support for Czech, Danish, Dutch, English,
French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. If When has not
been translated into your language, or has only been partially
translated, the text that hasn’t been translated will be displayed in
English. When should automatically detect what language you use (via
your $LANG environment variable), and if When has been translated into
that language, that’s what you’ll get -- When’s output will be in your
language, and When will also expect you to use that language in your
calendar file for the names of the months and the days of the week.
Your calendar file must be in UTF-8 (or ASCII, which is a subset of
UTF-8). If your calendar file is in some other encoding, such as
ISO-8859, When will typically be able to detect that, and will refuse
to read it. Command-line options can also contain UTF-8.
Some terminal emulators (aterm, ...) display accented characters as
garbage, but others (mlterm, xterm...) can display them correctly.
When checks the $TERM environment variable, and if it equals "mlterm"
or "xterm", then accented characters will be displayed. Otherwise, they
are filtered out of the output. You can override this by putting a
line like
filter_accents_on_output = 0
or
filter_accents_on_output = 1
in your ~/.when/preferences file. I’d be interested in hearing from any
users who can suggest a better mechanism for this than attempting to
interpret the $TERM variable.
On input, accents are allowed, but not required, e.g., in a French-
language input file, the date 2005 Fev 17 could be given with an
accented e or an unaccented one, and either will work. If an input
month or day of the week does not match any of the ones for your
language, then When will try to interpret it as English instead.
You can put a line like
language = fr
in your preferences file to set your language, or supply the --language
option on the command line, but that’s not necessary if your $LANG
environment variable is set correctly.
FORMAT OF THE PREFERENCES FILE
Each line consists of something like this:
variable = value
Whitespace is ignored everywhere except inside the value. Variable
names are case-insensitive. Blank lines are ignored.
MORE EXAMPLES
A useful command to have your shell execute when you log in is this:
when --past=0 --future=1
To print out a calendar for a full year to come:
when --past=0 --future=365 c
POPPING UP YOUR CALENDAR WHEN YOU LOG IN
Your calendar doesn’t do you any good if you forget to look at it every
day. An easy way to make it pop up when you log in is to make your
.xsession or .xinitrc file look like this:
/usr/bin/when --past=0 --future=1 &>~/when.today
emacs -geometry 70x25 -bg bisque ~/when.today &
startkde
The .xsession file is used if you have a graphical login manager set up
on your machine, the .xinitrc if you don’t. In this example, the first
line outputs your calendar to a file. The complete path to the When
program is given, because your shell’s path variable will not yet be
properly initialized when this runs. The second line pops up a GUI
emacs window, which is distinctively colored so that it will catch your
eye. The last line starts your window manager, KDE in this example.
Whatever window manager you use, just make sure to retain the
preexisting line in the file that starts it, and make sure that that
line is the very last one in the file.
FANCY TESTS
In addition to w, discussed above, there are a bunch of other variables
you can test:
w - day of the week
m - month
d - day of the month
y - year
j - modified Julian day number
a - 1 for the first 7 days of the month, 2 for the next 7, etc.
b - 1 for the last 7 days of the month, 2 for the previous 7, etc.
e - days until this year's (Western) Easter
You can specify months either as numbers, m=2, or as names in your
language, m=feb. You can also use the logical operators & (and) and |
(or). The following example reminds you to pay your employees on the
first and fifteenth day of every month:
d=1 | d=15 , Pay employees.
This example reminds you to rehearse with your band on the last
Saturday of every month:
w=sat & b=1 , Rehearse with band.
The following two lines
* dec 25 , Christmas
m=dec & d=25 , Christmas
both do exactly the same thing, but the first version is easier to
understand and makes the program run faster. (When you do a test, When
has to run through every day in the range of dates you asked for, and
evaluate the test for each of those days. On my machine, if I print out
a calendar for a whole year, using a file with 10 simple tests in it,
it takes a few seconds.) Parentheses can be used, too.
Depending on your nationality and religion, you probably have a bunch
of holidays that don’t lie on fixed dates. In Christianity, many of
these (the "movable feasts") are calculated relative to Easter Sunday,
which is why the e variable is useful. Here are some examples of how to
set up some common holidays:
* feb 14 , Valentine’s Day
e=47 , Mardi Gras
e=46 , Ash Wednesday
e=7 , Palm Sunday
e=0 , Easter Sunday
e=0-49 , Pentecost (49 days after easter)
m=jan & w=mon & a=3 , Martin Luther King Day
m=sep & w=mon & a=1 , Labor Day
m=may & w=mon & b=1 , Memorial Day
m=may & w=sun & a=2 , Mother’s Day
m=jun & w=sun & a=3 , Father’s Day
m=nov & w=thu & a=4 , Thanksgiving (U.S.)
m=oct & w=mon & a=2 , Thanksgiving (Canada)
There is a not operator, !:
w=fri & !(m=dec & d=25) , poker game
There is a modulo operator, %, and a subtraction operator, -. Using
these, along with the j variable, it is just barely possible for When’s
little parser to perform the following feat:
!(j%14-1) , do something every other Wednesday
The logic behind this silly little piece of wizardry goes like this.
First, we determine, using the command ‘when j --now="2005 jan 26"’,
that the first Wednesday on which we want to do this has a Julian day
that equals 1, modulo 14. Then we write this expression so that if it’s
a Wednesday whose Julian day equals 1, modulo 14, the quantity in
parentheses will be zero, and taking its logical negation will yield a
true value.
The operators’ associativity and order of priority (from highest to
lowest) is like this:
left %
left -
left < > <= >=
left = !=
right !
left &
left |
ENVIRONMENT
$LANG to automatically detect the user’s language
$TERM to try to figure out if the terminal emulator can display
accented characters
FILES
$HOME/.when/calendar - The default location for the user’s calendar
(pointed to by the preferences file)
$HOME/.when/preferences - The user’s preferences.
OTHER INFORMATION
When’s web page is at
http://www.lightandmatter.com/when/when.html ,
where you can always find the latest version of the software. There is
a page for When on Freshmeat, at
http://freshmeat.net/projects/when/ ,
where you can give comments, rate it, and subscribe to e-mail
announcements of new releases.
AUTHOR
When was written by Ben Crowell,
http://www.lightandmatter.com/personal/. Dimiter Trendafilov wrote the
new and improved parser for date expressions. This man page was based
on Bryce Harrington’s man page for inkscape.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2003-2005 by Benjamin Crowell.
When is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GPL, or, optionally, Perl’s license.