MATH DEPT Computer News, Volume 21

I came, I saw, ical

There's a great new calendar and appointment book program on our system called ical at

/pkgs/tcl/bin/ical

You can try it out by typing

/pkgs/tcl/bin/ical &

at a prompt in an xterm. (The ampersand "&" puts the ical job in the "background" so you can continue to use your xterm window for something else if you want to.)

The ical program is easily customized and virtually self explanatory. One feature I really like is that it will beep me and flash a reminder at me any number of times before an appointment. Click on OPTIONS and choose DEFAULT ALARMS to set the number and intervals of the reminders.

Another feature that is nice is that when you select PRINT from the FILE menu, the program will print the currently displayed month as a standard calendar page sideways to fill a regular sheet of paper with as many of your appointments squeezed into each day as will fit.

If you like ical, you'll want to create something easier to type to start it up. First, type

which ical

to verify that the ical command is not in your path. (If it turns out to be in your path, you can just type ical to fire it up.)

If ical is not in your path, you can do one of the following two things. You could put it in your path by making the relevant lines in your .cshrc file look something like this:

# Add personal binary directories to the search path.  For security,
# "." should go at the end (if at all).

set path = ( ~/bin $path /pkgs/tcl/bin . )

NOTE: You'll need to log off and log back on again for changes in your .cshrc file to take hold.

Another way to simplify your life would be to make an "alias" in your .cshrc file for the hard to type command. You could add the line

alias appoints '/pkgs/tcl/bin/ical &'

at the end of your .cshrc file. Then you could just type

appoints

at an xterm prompt to start up ical.

In case ical is more calendar power than you need, I mention here that UNIX hounds know that you can type

cal

to see a calendar of this month, and

cal 2001

to see the whole calendar for the year of 2001, and

cal 3 2025

to see what day your birthday in March will be on in the year 2025.

Also there is a dorky little program called xcalendar at

/opt/local/X11/xcalendar

that might satisfy your needs.

ADDENDUM 5/10/2002

You can find a very nice calendar program called gnomecal at

/opt/gnome-1.4/bin/gnomecal

It works very much like the ical program above, but it has the nice feature that appointments appear on the month view of the calendar, and they look especially nice when you make it go full screen. (However, it does not have a print command, which can be irritating.)

You can put the gnomecal command in your path by making the relevant lines in your .cshrc file look like this:

# Add personal binary directories to the search path.  For security,
# "." should go at the end (if at all).

set path = ( ~/bin $path /opt/gnome-1.4/bin . )

NOTE: You'll need to log off and log back on again for changes in your .cshrc file to take hold.

After this, you can just type gnomecal at a prompt to fire up the calendar.

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