2004-05-24 · in Ideas · 156 words

Unix users have traditionally had the simple "cal" program to show this month's calendar, and can reasonably easily produce a one-liner to let them keep track of upcoming events in a text file (mine's grep "^`date +'%Y%m%d'`" ~/todolist). These days, there are standard formats for specifying calendar information from people like the IETF calsch working group and the RDF Calendar taskforce; it would be nice if there were command-line tools to easily manipulate these.

Tools could include:

It would similarly be nice to have command-line tools for managing other PIM data: contacts (in vCard or FOAF format), to-do lists, and so on. A really fancy solution could tie in with an mh-like suite of email tools (although preferably one that spoke IMAP and Maildir) for easy "intertwingling" from shell scripts.