Not very useful.

It is a little easier if you use Google Calendar’s “agenda view” which simply lists, in chronological order, the upcoming appointments, so days on which you have nothing scheduled do not take up space. Like this:

But that still kind of sucks, since the vast majority of information on that screen has little to do with the information you are looking for. As long as a command line interface is available, which it is, wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick and dirty command that you could type in to retrieve your calendar, perhaps manipulate it, and even get a simple text-based agenda view that one can actually see?

There is, and it’s called gcalcli. When I type “gcalcli” into a command line with the argument “agenda”, I get this:

With relatively little configuration, gcalcli knows where to go and get my calendar information. The program has lots of options, most of which are used to select among the various calendars you have access to or to configure the output. When I typed in:

gcalcli list

the program outputs a list of four calendars that I have access to. I knew about the first two of them already. The third is a calendar called “US Holidays” which I imagine comes along with Google Calendar. The fourth is that of an organization I belong to, though I had forgotten about the calendar.

One option tells the “agenda” command to include all the details within the calendar and not just the date/time and name of event. The calendars can be searched (but for whole words only). Another command outputs a week’s calendar in a nice formatted arrangement:

And, yet another outputs an entire month. Unfortunately, when I tried that I got an error and some gobbly-code.

It is possible to add single appointments using the command “quick”:

There is also a way to execute a command if an event is to occur within a certain amount of time. This might be run on start up of a particular terminal or integrated with a chron job, to develop your own personal way of annoying yourself into getting your stuff done.

There are lots of other options. You can read more about it here, and if you are using Debian/Ubuntu, you can install the software in synaptic (search for gcalcli) or by simply typing the magic words:

sudo apt-get install gcalcli

This application firmly sits in the Class II cli App category, which I’ve discussed before. This is where you want a GUI version and a cli version of the same app, in this case, accessing the same database. Different circumstances demand different approaches. Learning two or three commands with gcalcli will augment your Google Calendar experience and make you look really cool at the coffee shop. But there will still be times when the web-based GUI interface makes the most sense.

Furthermore, and I’m sure you already know this, you can easily define and save an alias for “gcalcli agenda” (or any other combination of frequently used commands and options) so you would type only, say “agenda” or “appointments” or whatever to get the output you need on a regular basis.

Here’s another little trick in case you want to totally geek out. If you are using alpine for your email (I’ll discuss this great app later) you can type in ctrl-_ and call emacs as your secondary editor. From within emacs, select some irrelevant text (that step may not be necessary) and type ctrl-u to cause the output of the next command to replace that text. Then type shift-alt-| (the vertical bar thingie), which allows you to enter a shell command. Then, type in

gcalcli --nc agenda

The –nc strips the output of its color coding control codes, which are messy when they are not spewed onto a terminal. The selected text will be replaced with your agenda in nice, text form. Save, exit, and you’re back in alpine with your email to your significant other who just asked you “Are you available Wednesday night to go pick up the new car seat?” or whatever.

Obviously once you’ve done that a few times and perhaps refined the exact procedure, you’d make these commands into a macro so little more than a stern look and the flip of a single finger will insert your current agenda into whatever email you are currently writing. How cool is that?

I’ve provided a few technical tips and tricks for alpine, and here’s another one. In Linux, if you startup alpine like this:

alpine -k

you get the function key version. This replaces the control keys with function keys, and the help system reflects this change very nicely. I’m going to consider using it on my desktop in the Blog Cave, because that has an Avant Stellar keyboard with a set of function keys on the left side. I’m currently using these keys for something else (well, some of them) but I can play around with the old wordperfect model of having a truly extended almost-touch typing keyboard and see how that goes.

If the file exists, and alpine is asked for a password, then it checks that file for the password. If it is not there it asks you for the password, and then, after you’ve entered it, alpine asks you if you want to save that password in the file. If you say yes, then you are in business.

This has two important implications for you. One: If you want alpine to remember passwords, just create the file and it will happen. Two: If you have trouble at some later time with some kind of operation and you think that the part about asking for the password is screwing you up, delete the file and restart the program (you’ll have to know the password, of course, for when you are prompted for it later).

How do you create the file? Using the bash command ‘touch’ should do. But what file do you need to create? Well, that depends. The file alpine uses is determined at compile time. At present, it seems that the current version of alpine is using a file called ‘.pine-passfile’ (note the dot at the beginning of the file … this is a hidden file) and this file should be in your home directory.

So, to make this work:

1) Quit alpine

2) In a termnial, type:

touch .pine-passfile

3) Restart alpine, check for email and send email, and when asked for a password, enter it and respond “yes” to the prompt asking you if you want to save the password.

4) Give your mouse a little piece of cheese so it does not feel lonely.

For more information about alpine click here.

The default that alpine comes with, at least on my machine, seems to be the Epiphany browser I have no idea why. And when it goes there, it opens the browser and freezes the alpine screen, so I have to close the browser to go back to the email.

How quaint.

What I want it to do, of course is to open a tab in the most recently touched instance of Firefox, and not freeze the browser. This way I can navigate quickly through the links and open the ones I want to see as rapidly and efficiently as possible, each in a new tab.

To make this work, you need to do two things. First, navigate to the option for url-viewer in alpine. Second, enter the full path to the firefox browser. You can’t just enter “firefox” because … well, it won’t work for some reason that escapes me.

Navigate to the url-path by starting at the main menu, going to setup [S], then Configure [C], then ctrl-W to search and put in ‘url-v’ as the shortest string that will get you where you are going right away.

Then hit enter, and type in:

/usr/bin/firefox

Then reach over to your mouse and give it a little pet so it does not feel lonely, then hit enter and accept the value, Exit setup [E], confirm exit [Y] and go back to reading your email.

So, in short,

MSC ctrl-W url-v[ENTER]/usr/bin/firefox[ENTER]EY

(the MSCWE and Y need not be in upper case, it is just convention to show them that way)

Now, url’s will open in firefox, in the last used window, in a new tab.

Now, if you are more of a geek today than you were yesterday, you’d set your URL reader to lynx. If you do that, Lynx will open as a process in the same terminal window alpine is using (though this behavor can be altered by entering switches in the url-viewer option section, most likely) so you will need to quit [Q] lynx to get back to alpine. Try it, it’s a trip. Lynx is a bitch.

How, if tomorrow you find yourself waking up as even more of a geek than you did today, use a shell script using wget and some perl one liners to convert the url contents into a well behaved text file that you then process using sed.

Tame Teh Internet!

For more information about alpine click here.

It is possible, even probable, that other distros install alpine in a manner that functions correctly, and this may be a bug in the Ubuntu distribution, but I’m not sure. In any event, this is what you can try to fix it:

From within alpine, be at or go to the main menue

go to setup (S)
go to configure (C)

search for “spell” using ctrl-W (hit ctrol-w then type in “spell” without the quotes and hit enter)

You will arrive at the option “Spell Check Before Sending” … check that if you like, up to you.

Hit ctrl-W again and accept the default (“spell”)

You should now be at the option “Speller” which probably has no value set.

Hit enter to allow entry of a value, and type in:

aspell -c

This assumes you have aspell installed, which, if yo ure using Ubuntu you do. Note that the tricky part here is the ‘-c’ option. This causes alpine to invoke aspell in the “check spelling” mode.

If that does not work, complain in the comments below and someone will figure it out for you. Maybe.

For more information about alpine click here.