yewcal

Yewcal is a command line event planner/calendar.

Features

Add, edit, delete calendar entries
Show calendar entries
Notifications of impending events, email, sms, Slack
Day’s upcoming events in email
Selectively pull Google Calendar events
Syncronise to notification server

You can run a cron job to send notifications about imminent
events. You can push the event data to an AWS bucket to access from
some server and easily pull it and notify.

Usage

Create a new event:

yc create "Karl's birthday" "in 3 days"

Show today’s events

❯ yc today
Thu 2020-12-03      3996d419  12:30   Karl lecture: https:  CET            1:00:00
                    b1871798  15:09   Peter's birthday      CET            1:00:00
                    b358a46d  16:00   Weekly Management Ca  Europe/London  1:00:00

Edit an event by providing the id.

yc edit 3996d419

Show tomorrow’s events

yc tomorrow

❯ yc
Usage: yc.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
Options:
  --user TEXT  User name
  -d, --debug  Debug flag
  --help       Show this message and exit.
Commands:
  all                 List all events, past and future.
  cal                 Show calendar for months.
  check               Show how a data string will be interpreted.
  create              Create a calendar event.
  describe            Show detail about a calendar event.
  edit                Edit a calendar event.
  future              Show all future events.
  info                Show information about settings.
  notify-soon         Process notifications for imminent events.
  notify-today        Show today's events.
  pull-events         Pull event data from remote storage.
  pull-google-events  Interactively pull data from user's google calendar.
  push-events         Push event data to remote storage.
  today               Show today's events.
  tomorrow            Show tomorrow's events.
  tz                  List all timezones.

Date specification

We use the dateparser
package to parse dates. There is a command “check” that can be used to
check the result of a natural language date:

❯ yc check "in a week"
2020-12-10T09:07:51.727824
❯ yc check "in 4 days"
2020-12-07T09:08:32.258311
❯ yc check "in 4 weeks"
2020-12-31T09:08:38.632423
❯ yc check tomorrow
2020-12-04T09:09:13.509811
❯ yc check today
2020-12-03T09:09:18.396979
❯ yc check "in two months"
2021-02-03T09:12:58.198817
❯ yc check "12 december"
2020-12-12T00:00:00
❯ yc check "12 dec"
2020-12-12T00:00:00

Timezones

Yewcal will detect and use the local timezone as the default
timezone. But you can specify different timezones for each
event. Timezones can be specified with -t:

yc create "Management meeting" thursday -t london

cron jobs

The reason for the system of setting up an AWS bucket is to give
access to a server side instance of yewcal to enable notifications
even when your workstation is not running or you want notifications on
your phone.

Here are three crons for the server:

# pull data locally 
*/15 * * * * cd /home/someuser/yewcal && /home/someuser/yewcal/.venv/bin/python3.8 yc.py pull-events >>  /home/someuser/yewcal/cron.log 2>&1
# send notifications for events that are happening in the next few minutes
*/5 * * * * cd /home/someuser/yewcal && /home/someuser/yewcal/.venv/bin/python3.8 yc.py notify-soon >>  /home/someuser/yewcal/cron.log 2>&1
# send an email at 8am every morning with a digest of events for the day
0 8 * * * cd /home/someuser/yewcal && /home/paul/yewcal/.venv/bin/python3.8 yc.py notify-today >>  /home/someuser/yewcal/cron.log 2>&1

You would either need to manually push your event data to the AWS bucket or setup a cron on your local machine to regularly update the remote copy of data.

Google Calendar

There is an integration with Google calendar. You need to setup your credentials. Check for where your data directory is:

❯ yc info
constants.BASE_DATA_PATH='/Users/paul/.yew.d/paul/cal'
constants.EVENTS_FILENAME='events.json'
constants.CURRENT_TZ=datetime.timezone(datetime.timedelta(seconds=3600), 'CET')
constants.DEFAULT_TZ_NAME='CET'