conky with ical - petermolnar.net

I encountered a simple problem: how to display ical calendar events with conky without writing an ical parser. The solution came in the form of a suprising tool: calcurse. This is a command-line, text-based, slightly graphical-like interface for ical handling.

So: download the calendar, import it into calcurse, show it in conky. But how to manage possible remote update? Do this every 30 minutes.

install calcurse

sudo apt-get install calcurse

load_calendars.sh

#!/bin/bash

# clear calcurse data
rm ~/.calcurse/apts

# array for remote calendars
calendars=( 'http://link-to-first-cal.ics' 'http://link-to-second-cal.ics' 'and so on' );

# temp file to save a calendar
TMPCAL=/tmp/temp.ics

# run through the calendars
for ical in "${calendars[@]}"
do
    # download ical file
    wget -q "$ical" -O $TMPCAL
    # import into calcurse, error & output silenced
    calcurse -i $TMPCAL >/dev/null 2>&1
    # clear the temp calendar file
    rm $TMPCAL
done

# display current & next 6 days (7 altogether)
calcurse -r7

conky-cal.conf

use_xft yes
xftfont DejaVu Sans:size=8
xftalpha 0.8
text_buffer_size 2048
total_run_times 0
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 1
net_avg_samples 1
override_utf8_locale yes
double_buffer yes
use_spacer none

own_window yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
minimum_size 420 0
maximum_width 420
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
stippled_borders 0
border_width 0
default_color grey
own_window_colour grey
alignment top_left

update_interval 3600
gap_x 20
gap_y 20

TEXT
${font DejaVu Sans:style=Bold:size=10}EVENTS${font}
${font DejaVu Sans:size=9}${exec /path/to/load_calendars.sh}${font}

(Oh, by the way: this entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.)