cal-suite

cal-suite is an informal name for command-line wrappers for gcalcli, an unofficial command-line interface to Google Calendar. These wrappers have been updated frequently and haphazardly as my needs have changed.

In my early days of college, I would frequently neglect to complete assignments or procrastinate severely since I never had an excellent perception on how “close” a deadline would be. Google Calendar was a common solution that many of my peers used, but I never liked the idea of pulling out my phone or a web browser to check my deadlines.

As most of my computer interaction is done through terminal-based applications, I decided to write something that would essentially show how many days and hours I have left until my next deadline. gcalcli itself was an excellent improvement, but cal-suite became a necessity due to my desire to exert greater control over the number of deadlines to be displayed, shortcuts to input event names associated with specific courses I’d be taking in a given semester, and so forth. As a result, my closest deadlines are always visible in front of me whenever I’m on my computer, which has helped me stay accountable.

My status bar for my Macbook Air. Thanks to the `calnext` output to the left, I can immediately tell that I have 2 deadlines due in 14 hours and 14 minutes.

Though the code was written by me, this project would have not been possible without gcalcli and inspiration from its example integration with tmux, from which I began to write cal-suite.

This project was one of the reasons why I grew to love coding (to the point that I’d select both of my interdisciplinary electives to be classes that teach about programming — which includes ICS 314). I’d fall into cycles of editing code to add functionality, then hastily rewrite it to see what else I could do with it. I learned a bit about some of Python’s standard libraries (os, subprocess, argparse, pickle, and time), touched on class-based and non-class-based approaches to the problem, and a few other things that kept me from getting too rusty with programming.

I do not have a repository that logs the development of the script, but you can find the source for calnext (prints upcoming deadlines) here and calmod (quickly add, edit, or delete events) here at the time of writing.