Use calcurse on a Linux terminal to schedule appointments and to-do lists

Use calcurse on a Linux terminal to schedule appointments and to-do lists

If you are a system administrator who enjoys Linux terminals, but you also need a way to arrange the most important tasks, appointments, and meetings of each day, you will find calcurse is a very useful tool. Calcurse includes calendar, a to-do list management, a scheduler, and a configurable notification system. These are all integrated into a software based on ncurse interfaces. At the same time, it does not limit you to the terminal, you can export your calendar and notes into printable format.

This article will explore how to install calcurse on Linux and teach you how to use its features.

Installing Culcurse on Linux

Calcurse is available in standard repositories of most Linux distributions. If you have not installed the gcc and ncurse development files (such as CentOS/RHEL) on your release, you can install them from the source code.

Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint

1. # Aptitude install calcurse

Fedora

1. # Yum install calcurse

CentOS/RHEL

1. # Yum install gcc ncurses-devel
2. # Wget http://calcurse.org/files/calcurse-3.2.1.tar.gz
3. # Tar xvfvz calcurse-3.2.1.tar.gz
4. # Cd calcurse-3.2.1
5. #./Configure
6. # Make
7. # Make install

Start Calcurse

After the installation is complete, you can start calcurse with the following command:

1. $ Calcurse

You will see the following blank interface. If this color does not attract you, you can change it later.

Now we can press ENTER-'q'-again press ENTER-'y' to exit the main interface. This key sequence activates the main menu at the bottom of the interface and tells it to save the current note and confirm to exit.

When we run calcurse for the first time, the following sub-directories will be created in the main directory:

Here is a brief description of each subdirectory:

• The apts file contains all your appointments and events, and the todo file contains the list of all to-do events.
• The conf file, as you think, contains the independent settings of the current user.
• The keys file contains user-defined key binding (for example, exit q or Q, and export content x or X ).
• In the notes sub-directory, you will see a file containing the note description, which can be attached to any arrangement.

Change color

To change the color scheme, follow these steps:

Use the button binding of the last graph to select the foreground color and background color to better adapt to your needs:

Add appointment and to-do tasks

When browsing the command menu in the previous tab, we can see that pressing 'O' can jump from one menu to the next menu. We can use the second menu as the arrangement editing menu.

Press Ctrl + A and Ctrl + T to add A new appointment and A new to-do task for today. If we want to specify a specific date for the appointment instead of today, we can use Ctrl + L (+ 1 day), Ctrl + H (-1 day), Ctrl + J (+ 1 week) and Ctrl + K (-1 week) combination key.

The steps for adding a to-do task are similar, but Ctrl + T is used, which has been explained previously:

You will also be asked to enter a priority so that the to-do task will be displayed on the home page:

Now you can verify that the to-do task and appointment have been added to the todo and apts files in the. culcurse folder accordingly:

Note that you can use your favorite editor or the calcurse screen at the bottom of the menu to edit these files. You can press the TAB to switch between different panels and select the project you want to edit:

Set notifications for items

You can configure notifications in the notification menu. Follow the same steps to change the color scheme, but select Notify instead of Colour:

Suppose you want to set email notification. Press number 5 to edit the value of the notify-bar_command:

According to the above settings, if this task is marked as important, then root @ localhost will receive an email notification after 300 seconds (or 5 minutes), which will happen before the next scheduled task. If you want to enable this feature even if calcurse is not running, set the notify-daemon_enable to yes. In this example, dev2 is the host name of the local machine.

Note that for demonstration purposes, I have changed the start time and/or end time of the original appointment in this tutorial.

Summary

This tutorial shows how to set up a variety of schedulers and wake-ups to help you organize daily activities and arrange important things in advance. You may also want to read calcurse's PDF manual. Please feel free to ask your questions in the following comments. Welcome to your comments. I am also glad to see these comments.

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