Try Remind as a command-line iCal replacement

Sep 27, '04 08:45:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I recently realized that I was very dissatisfied with iCal, because I wanted something that would be simple and powerful without being bulky or slow to load. I found my answer in a fantastic open-source program called Remind, which has evidently actually been around since the late eighties, if you can believe that.

Remind lets you do extremely sophisticated date entry, the permutations of which would be far too complex to go into here. Let's just say it's both very flexible and very powerful, allowing you to use it to run tasks at certain dates and times (much like cron, but with a more powerful timing ability), to run in a daemon mode (if need be) for timed reminders, as well as much more, including access to religious (Hebrew) and foreign calendars. It can handle giving you advance warning about an event ahead of time ("Event X in 3 days' time, 2 days' time, 1 day's time," etc.), recurring events, and more. It also comes with scripts to let you export your calendar to simple HTML and also to PostScript.

If you'd like to do more complex reminder entry, then you will need to study its scripting language a bit, and some of the more complex examples can be stumpers -- looking at this LinuxJournal article or this Google search may help. Fortunately, it also comes with TKRemind, which provides a GUI interface to much of the scripting language. You would need to install TCL/TK Aqua to gain access to that. The TKRemind interface, however, appears to be extremely buggy. You may need to often quit and restart the tkremind application in order to get the answer you're seeking. I recommend not letting it actually write to your reminder file, but instead just using 'Preview Reminder' to get the language you're seeking.

For extra fun, you can pipe the output through the GeekTool preference pane, so that your personal calendar can be displayed on your desktop.

This program is wonderful, but I must admit, it would be fantastic if some enterprising Mac developer wrote a GUI 'wrapper' for it. The existence of such a wrapper in TCL/TK shows that such a project is feasible, I would imagine. Anyone particularly entranced by the idea?

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