Xcalim is a very customizable calendar program made with the X Athena Widgets library. It stems from Xcal, from Peter Collinson.¹ Features include:
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Alarms
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No need for the mouse, we have keyboard navigation
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Grid calendar view (instead of Xcal's strip)
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Daemon mode
Events can start with time stamps, which are used to trigger alarms (if activated). For example,
18:10 John Doe's wedding
Additional alarms may be set, say, 5 min in advance of each event, and commands can be set to run to each alarm.
It can run as a -daemon, i.e., without spawning a initial window,
which is useful to monitor and issue alarms without the need to keep a window open.
Clone the repository, enter its directory, make and install.
git clone https://github.com/qsmodo/xcalim
cd xcalim
xmkmf && make Makefiles && make derived && make depend && make && sudo make install
Dependencies include Libxaw, Libxmu and, for building, Xmkmf (xutils-dev package
in Debian).
The original Xcal (which can be found in Debian repositories) was bundled with several
auxiliar programs. I'm also distributing them
here. See README.contents and their manpages for more details on what they do.
The best one if you don't want a GUI (although a Tk GUI is also available). I failed to write an alarm to trigger at both x and 0 minutes before, but perhaps I didn't try hard enough. I missed a 2d view of the day/week as in Plan below, which I plan to add to Xcalim.
A truly amazing Motif calendar with day, week, month and year views. Very advanced alarm handling and interface. I really like it, but it would occasionally skip alarms in my tests, and this is definetly a no-go for me, and I failed to track it down. Unfortunately, it encodes files in ISO-8859, not UTF-8. The appointments file structure is quite complicated and undocumented, for users are not supposed to manage them by hand. Keyboard navigation is likewise restricted, mouse is relied upon very much.
This one is Tk based. Also very good, but not so powerful as Plan. Cannot rely solely on keyboard either.
1: I would keep the name Xcal but it clashes with various unrelated software.
Xcalim, on the other hand, seems unused.
2: For X-resources (mainly colors and fonts) customization, Getting the most out of X-resources is a useful article.