YJL

I just discovered this much more powerful GNU gcal program. It has a lot of features that cal doesn’t have. My base command to list calendar is:

% cal -3s
    December 2010         January 2011          February 2011
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4                     1         1  2  3  4  5
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11   2  3  4  5  6  7  8   6  7  8  9 10 11 12
12 13 14 15 16 17 18   9 10 11 12 13 14 15  13 14 15 16 17 18 19
19 20 21 22 23 24 25  16 17 18 19 20 21 22  20 21 22 23 24 25 26
26 27 28 29 30 31     23 24 25 26 27 28 29  27 28
                      30 31

The command for the similar result using gcal is:

% gcal .


                                2010/2011


      December                  January                   February
 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa      Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa      Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
           1  2  3  4                         1             1  2  3  4  5
  5  6  7  8  9 10 11       2  3  4  5  6  7  8       6  7  8  9 10 11 12
 12 13 14 15 16 17 18       9 10 11 12 13 14 15      13 14 15 16 17 18 19
 19 20 21 22 23 24 25      16 17 18 19 20 21 22      20 21 22 23 24 25 26
 26 27 28 29 30 31         23 24 25 26 27 28 29      27 28
                           30 31

My old dzen script showed 3-month calendar in this way:

Now it’s much better:

And the code is sort of simpler, you can see the diff. The basic command is

gcal --cc-holiday=TW+US_NY --holiday-list=short --highlighting=\<:\>:[:] .

First arguments lists what country holidays I need, I use two, Taiwan and New York State of US, you can use plus sign + to list more than one. I also change the highlighting characters, so I can do some dzen syntax later. I tried to give it a string instead of single character, but gcal doesn’t accept that. So I used <>[] which don’t seem to be used by gcal itself, then used sed to replace with the strings I really need. You can use same method for ANSI color escape code if you want. Note that the last period . is for 3-month format. There are more information in its info page, info gcal, or you can run gcal -hh -p.

I think the most amazing part of gcal is you can have a holiday list. I think you can also import your schedule from some source with a bit of coding help. But I don’t have such need, therefore I didn’t dig in.