Ask HN: Digital Wall Calendar?

3 points by marymkearney 2 years ago | 5 comments

Remember those monthly wall calendars you just write your appointments on? Has anyone seen a digital version of that, where you can jot down a note for a day in plain text?

Plain text calendars like calendar.txt are great. [1] It would be super helpful, to see that list data in a month grid as well.

There's an Android app called Calendar Notes that does something like this, but it's not interoperable with Mac.

It could be a local file, an app, or a browser extension. Compatible with Mac desktop and Android phone.

Not looking for word processing calendars like Word or Google Docs. Also not Apple or Google Calendar. Really just plain text notes with a calendar-grid GUI. Thanks!

[1] https://terokarvinen.com/2021/calendar-txt/, discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31574125 (05/2022).

Edited for brevity.

tero 2 years ago |

Author of calendar.txt here. I use scripts to pick whatever information I need. For example, I have a command called 'today'. It shows X next days of my calendar and summary of next X weeks.

Marymkearney, you could write a similar program for your grid calendar.

1. Print HTML start boilerplate. Start an HTML table and row (tr). 2. Read a line of calendar.txt. 3. Print contents of the day as table cell (td). 4. If day is Sunday (string matches "\bSun\b"), print row change (/tr, tr). 5. ... 6. Profit.

HTML is quite convenient for printing, and you can modify it with CSS. As an added bonus for Quinzel, you can copy your static calendar to your devices, and make any device show it - so you don't need to turn those pages. To make the static HTML file available to your devices, you could use syncthing or a web server in local network.

marymkearney 2 years ago | |

Hello, thanks so much for the reply. I really do like calendar.txt. I'm especially a fan of the week numbers. It matches how I conceptualize time. Thank you!

Here's my issue. I'm proficient in HTML and CSS. I can make a nice grid or table, and view the static file on different devices. But I don't know how to populate it with anything. I'm not a programmer, I can't do scripts, and my brain basically stops at the command line. (I'm a lawyer by day job. Maybe that's why.)

So I was hoping to find an already-done-for-you calendar grid that you could write on. Bonus points for defaulting to the current month.

Thanks again for taking my question!

meristohm 2 years ago |

Remember those monthly paper wall calendars? Of course- that's what I still use. What you're looking for sounds interesting and would solve my problem of either having to add the same entries digitally so my spouse can see them on her phone (her preference) or putting it on her to look at the paper calendar. I far prefer handwritten entries (I'm in my 40s and continue to enjoy journaling and writing letters, if that's helpful context) and for a digital wall calendar would still want to use a pencil or pen- maybe a digital pressure sensor pad underneath the paper to transcribble my notes to our shared calendar, or to a scrollable image of the wall calendar?

marymkearney 2 years ago |

Just to add to the knowledge base here. I tried a hack in iCalendar and Google Calendar. If you add an entry as "all-day event," it does show a nice line item in month view. That gets you pretty close.

Infuriatingly, there's no way to re-order multiple line items in any logical way. They appear in one order on desktop, a different order on mobile, in no apparent pattern. Numbering, alphabetizing, starring, etc. doesn't change this.

This happens in BOTH Apple and Google calendars. I know this will enrage me every time I use it. So best give it a pass.

Quinzel 2 years ago |

Do you mean like a digital wall calendar, but you don’t have to remember to turn the pages? Every time I buy a wall calendar, it stays on January and I miss out on the rest of the pictures :(