I've completed work and testing on my terminal calendar/reminder program written in Perl, and I'm looking for some hale and hearty beta testers:

perlcal
This is perlcal v. 0.9.0, a terminal calendar/reminder program written in Perl. It was written and tested with Perl v. 5.8.8 on a CentOS box in December 2008 and January of 2009 and I didn't notice any errors.

I wrote this program because I prefer the simplicity and speed of shell programs and I couldn't find one I liked that did what I wanted. This program allows you to add individual and recurring event items, edit and delete those items either singly or as a set, and search for particular items anywhere in the calendar. Any dates and times entered are sanity checked, to include leap year consideration. The program stores its data in a simple text file for easy backups.

This is the initial release of this program. If you want to be notified of updates by email, send me an address and I will do so. I won't let anyone else have your email address for any reason (other than subpoena or search warrant; what have you been up to?) Or you can stop by my blog occasionally, I'll have a link on it that indicates the latest version.

To download this program, go here. In order to slow down the bots, this is a password-protected directory that will require some human input. The username is:

perlcal

...and the password is:

nobots

There are directions on the download page about downloading and uncompressing the tarball.

What you need to do to make this application work on your computer:

I recommend you create the directory .perlcal in your home directory. Copy the files perlcal.pl and perlcal_data into that directory. Fix your permissions:

chmod 700 perlcal.pl
chmod 600 perlcal_data

Open perlcal.pl with your favorite text editor and navigate to line 19:

$DATA = '/home/<USER>/.perlcal/perlcal_data';

Change <USER> to your account username.

You will note just above that line a reference to the following Perl modules:

Term::ANSIColor;
Time::Local;
Term::ReadKey;

You have to have those modules installed on your computer for this application to work. The first one is probably already installed. You can retrieve any that aren't from the CPAN repository. To do that, su to system root and do:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

You should be presented with a cpan prompt, at which you can issue the command to install the modules, as in:

cpan> install Module::Name

Notes:

I hardcoded the datafile absolute path into the program because I launch it from the gnome panel, and it won't work with a relative path. ymmv.

Since I separate the data fields by the '^', the program will strip any caret you may enter as data.

In addition to the text navigation prompts you'll see on screen, the following keybindings also work:

'h' = prior month (same as 'M' shown)
'l' = next month (same as 'm' shown)
'k' = prior week (same as 'W' shown)
'j' = next week (same as 'w' shown)
'/' = search (same as 's' shown)
'left arrow' = prior month (same as 'M' shown)
'right arrow' = next month (same as 'm' shown)
'up arrow' = prior week (same as 'W' shown)
'down arrow' = next week (same as 'w' shown)
'page up' = prior year (same as 'Y' shown)
'page down' = next year (same as 'y' shown)

Enjoy!

Download perlcal.