Name¶

wyrd - the user manual for wyrd(1), an ncurses interface to remind(1).

Synopsis¶

Wyrd User Manual

Paul J. Pelzl

"Because you're tired of waiting for your bloated calendar program to start up."

Documentation¶

1 Introduction

Wyrd is a text-based front-end to Remind , a sophisticated calendar and alarm program. Wyrd serves two purposes:

1) It displays reminders in a scrollable timetable view suitable for visualizing your calendar at a glance.
2) It makes creating and editing reminders fast and easy. However, Wyrd does not hide Remind's textfile programmability, for this is what makes Remind a truly powerful calendaring system.

Wyrd also requires only a fraction of the resources of most calendar programs available today.

2 Installation

Wyrd is designed to be portable to most Unix-like operating systems, including GNU/Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. Before installing Wyrd, your system must have the following software installed:

• OCaml
>= 4.08
• the ncurses library
(and development headers)
• OCaml Curses

• Remind
>= 4.0.0
• GNU make

• the Unix pager application, less

After installing the OCaml compiler, Wyrd may be compiled and installed through any of the following 3 methods:

2.1 Method 1: GNU make and OCaml findlib

   export PREFIX=/usr


   make


   make install

On the BSDs, GNU make is usually available under the name gmake instead of make.

2.2 Method 2: Dune

   export WYRD_SYSCONFDIR=/etc


   dune build --release


   dune install --prefix=/usr --sections=bin

2.3 Method 3: OPAM

   opam init -c ocaml-system -n


   opam install -y ./wyrd.opam

3) Wyrd may then be started with this command:

   opam exec wyrd

3 Quick Start

4 Overview

You can launch Wyrd using the default reminder file by executing wyrd. If desired, a different reminder file (or reminder directory) may be selected by executing wyrd <filename>.

At the top of the window is a short (incomplete) list of keybindings.

The left window displays a scrollable timetable view, with reminders highlighted in various colors. If the DURATION specifier is used for a reminder, the highlighted area is rendered with an appropriate size. Overlapping reminders are rendered using one of four different indentation levels so that all reminders are at least partially visible. If the current time is visible in this window, it is highlighted in red.

The upper right window displays a month calendar, with the color of each day representing the number of reminders it contains. The colors range across shades of white to blue to magenta as the number of reminders increases. The selected date is highlighted in cyan; if the current date is visible, it is highlighted in red.

The lower right window displays a list of the untimed reminders falling on the selected date.

The bottom window displays the full text of the MSG for the reminder or reminders that are currently selected.

5 Navigation

Notice that if you have a numeric keypad, the {4, 6, 8, 2} keys will let you move directionally in the month calendar view at the upper-right of the screen. Similarly, {H, J, K, L} will cause directional calendar movement using the standard mapping from vi(1).

In addition to the hotkeys provided above, Wyrd lets you jump immediately to a desired date by pressing 'g', entering in a date specifier, and then pressing <return>. Any of the following date specifiers may be used:

• 8 digits representing year, month, and day: YYYYMMDD
• 4 digits representing month and day (of current year): MMDD
• 2 digits representing day (of current month and year): DD

(The date specifier format may be changed to DDMMYYYY; consult the section on Configuration Variables.)

6 Editing Reminders

If you select a timeslot in the schedule view, then hit 't', you will begin creating a new timed reminder. Wyrd will open up your reminder file in your favorite editor and move the cursor to the end of the file, where a new reminder template has been created. The template has the selected date and time filled in, so in many cases you will only need to fill in a MSG value.

Similarly, hitting 'u' will begin creating an untimed reminder. 'w' will create a weekly timed reminder, and 'W' will create a weekly untimed reminder; 'm' will create a monthly timed reminder, and 'M' will create a monthly untimed reminder.

The keys 'T' and 'U' also create timed and untimed reminders (respectively), but first will provide a selection dialog for you to choose which reminder file you want to add this reminder to. The set of reminder files is determined by scanning the INCLUDE lines in your default reminder file. (If you use a reminder directory, then all *.rem files in that directory will be available along with all INCLUDEd files.)

If you select a reminder (either timed or untimed) and hit <return>, you will begin editing that reminder. Wyrd will open up the appropriate reminders file in your editor and move the cursor to the corresponding REM line.

If you select a timeslot that contains multiple overlapping reminders, Wyrd will provide a dialog that allows you to select the desired reminder.

If you hit <enter> on a blank timeslot, Wyrd will begin creating a new timed or untimed reminder (depending on whether the timed or the untimed window is selected).

Finally, pressing 'e' will open the reminder file in your editor without attempting to select any particular reminder.

7 Quick Reminders

• meeting with Bob tomorrow at 11
• drop off package at 3pm
• Wednesday 10am-11:30 go grocery shopping
• Board game night 20:15 next Fri
• 7/4 independence day
• 7/4/2007 independence day (next year)
• independence day (next year) on 2007-07-04

If your event description can be understood, Wyrd will immediately create the reminder and scroll the display to its location.

Currently the quick reminder mode tends to favor USA English conventions, as generalizing the natural language parser would require some work.

Wyrd also allows you to use the "quick reminder" syntax to create new reminders from the command line, using the -a or --add options. For example,

   wyrd --add "dinner with neighbors tomorrow at 7pm"

would create a new reminder for tomorrow evening. When used in this mode, Wyrd exits silently with error code 0 if the reminder was successfully created. If the reminder could not be created (e.g. if the reminder syntax could not be parsed), Wyrd prints an error message and exits with a nonzero error code.

8 Cutting and Pasting Reminders

Selecting a reminder and pressing 'X' will cut that reminder: the corresponding REM line is deleted from your reminders file, and the reminder is copied to Wyrd's clipboard. To copy a reminder without deleting it, use 'y' instead.

To paste a reminder from the clipboard back into your schedule, just move the cursor to the desired date/time and press 'p'. Wyrd will append a new REM line to the end of your reminders file, and open the file with your editor. The REM line will be configured to trigger on the selected date. If the copied reminder was timed, then the pasted reminder will be set to trigger at the selected time using the original DURATION setting. (Additional Remind settings such as delta and tdelta are not preserved by copy-and-paste.)

If you wish to paste a reminder into a non-default reminders file, use 'P'. This will spawn a selection dialog where you can choose the file that will hold the new reminder.

WARNING: Cutting a reminder will delete only the single REM command responsible for triggering it. If you are using more complicated Remind scripting techniques to generate a particular reminder, then the cut operation may not do what you want.

9 Viewing Reminders

If you want to get a more global view of your schedule, Wyrd will also let you view Remind's formatted calendar output in a less(1) window. Pressing 'c' will view a one-week calendar that contains the selected date, while pressing 'C' will view a one-month calendar containing the selected date.

10 Searching for Reminders

The regular expression syntax is Emacs-compatible.

Note: Sorry, there is no "search backward" function. The search function requires the use of "remind -n", which operates only forward in time. For the same reason, there is a command to jump forward to the next reminder, but no command to jump backward to the previous reminder.

11 Other Commands

12 Alarm Strategies

   remind -z -k'gxmessage -title "reminder" %s &' ~/.reminders &

(A sensible way to start this alarm command is to place it in ~/.xinitrc so that it launches when the X server is started.)

If you want some advance warning (say, 15 minutes), you can cause Remind to trigger early by setting a tdelta in the AT clause:

   REM Nov 27 2005 AT 14:30 +15 MSG Do something

Alternatively, if you want to generate alarms only for specific reminders, consider using Remind's RUN command. This process could be easily automated by using the templateN configuration variables described in Advanced Configuration.

13 Miscellaneous

WARNING: These tag parameters are not guaranteed to interact well with other Remind front-ends such as tkremind.

14 Usage Tips

   set timed_template="REM %monname% %mday% %year% <++>AT %hour%:%min%<++> \


      DURATION 1:00<++> MSG %\"<++>%\" %b"


   set untimed_template="REM %monname% %mday% %year% <++>MSG %\"<++>%\" %b"

With this change, hitting Ctrl-J inside Vim (in insert mode) will cause your cursor to jump directly to the <++> markers, enabling you to quickly add any desired Remind delta and message parameters.

There is a page on Wyrd
in the Remind Wiki. This is a good place to look for other usage tips.

15 Licensing

Wyrd is Free Software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation. You should have received a copy of the GPL along with this program, in the file 'COPYING'.

16 Acknowledgments

Thanks also to Nicolas George, who wrote the OCaml curses bindings used within Wyrd.

17 Contact info

Wyrd website: https://gitlab.com/wyrd-calendar/wyrd

18 Miscellaneous

See Also

Author