Illustrated Linux using Calcurse to schedule appointments and to-do tutorials

Calcurse includes calendars, a to-do management, a scheduler, and a configurable notification system that integrates into a single 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 a format that can be printed.

In this article we'll explore how to install Calcurse on Linux and teach you how to take advantage of its features.

Install Culcurse on Linux

Calcurse is available in the standard warehouses of most Linux distributions. If you don't have any (such as Centos/rhel) on your release, you can simply install it from the source code once you've installed the GCC and ncurse development files.

Debian, Ubuntu, or Linux Mint

# Aptitude Install Calcurse

Fedora

# yum Install Calcurse

Centos/rhel

# yum Install gcc Ncurses-devel
# wget http://calcurse.org/files/calcurse-3.2.1.tar.gz
# tar Xvfvz calcurse-3.2.1.tar.gz
# CD calcurse-3.2.1
#./configure
# make
# make Install

Start Calcurse

Once the installation is complete, you can start the Calcurse with the following command:

$ calcurse

You will see the blank interface below. If this color doesn't appeal to you, you can change it later.

We can now press ENTER-' Q '-and press ENTER again-' Y ' to exit the main screen. This key sequence activates the main menu at the bottom of the interface and tells it to save the current notes and confirm the exit.

The first time we run Calcurse, the following subdirectories are created in the home directory:

Here is a brief description of each subdirectory:

The Apts file contains all the appointments and events for the user, and the Todo file contains all the to-do lists.

conf file, as you would think, contains the independent settings for the current user.

The keys file contains user-defined key bindings (such as: Q or Q exit, x or x export content, etc.).

In the Notes subdirectory you will see files that contain the description of the notes that you can attach to any of the scheduling items.

Change color

To change the color, follow these steps:

Use the key bindings of the last picture to select the foreground and background color configurations to better suit your needs:

Add appointments and to-do tasks

When you browse the command menu in the previous tab, we see that pressing ' o ' can jump from one menu to the next. We can edit the menu as an arrangement for the second menu.

Then we use 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 instead of today for the appointment, we can use CTRL + L (+ 1 days), CTRL + H (-1 days), CTRL + J (+ 1 weeks), and CTRL + K (1-week) key combinations before adding appointments and to-do items.

The steps to add a to-do task are similar, just with CTRL + T, previously explained:

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

You can now verify that the pending tasks and appointments have been added to the Todo and Apts files in the. Culcurse folder as appropriate:

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

Set up alerts for events

You can configure notifications under the Notification menu. Follow the same steps to change the color scheme, but select notify instead of colour:

Suppose you want to set up an email notification. Press the number 5来 edit Notify-bar_command value:

Following the above settings, if the task is marked as important, then Root@localhost will receive an email notification after 300 seconds (or 5 minutes), which will occur 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 case, Dev2 is the hostname of this machine.

Please note that I have changed the start and/or end times of the original appointment in this tutorial for demonstration purposes.