Remind

From ArchWiki

Remind is a sophisticated calendar and alarm program.

Installation

Install the remind package.

Configuration

After installation, the user can define reminders in remind script files (.rem). A good place for these files could be ~/.reminders or ~/.config/remind.

Here are some example reminders that could be in the remind script: 

~/.config/remind/reminders.rem
REM Jan 1 MSG Remind every year on new years day
REM January 1 2015 MSG Remind only on new years day 2015
REM Sunday 2 MSG Remind every second Sunday
REM March Monday 1 --7 MSG remind on the last Monday of February
REM December 25 +30 MSG Christmas

The last particular day of a month is given by subtracting 7 days from the first day of the next month. The + symbol tells remind to start reminding that number of days ahead.

See also remind(1) man page for detailed information about configuring remind.

Include

A reminder script can also include any number of external scripts. For example, a user might want to have a separate file for birthday reminders and a separate file for holidays. This can be done like so: 

include ~/.config/remind/birthdays.rem
include ~/.config/remind/holidays.rem

Usage

The simplest thing one can do with remind, is to check for reminders. Do this by passing a reminder file to remind: 

remind ~/.config/remind/reminders.rem

This will output a list of reminders that it is scheduled to tell the user about.

To output a text based calendar, use the -c option: 

remind -c1 ~/.config/remind/reminders.rem

This will output a text calendar for the current month. To print months in advance, replace 1 with the number of months to print.

Postscript/pdf calendars

It is also possible to create calendars in a postscript format. 

remind -c2 -p ~/.config/remind/reminders.rem | rem2ps > calendar.ps

The -p option makes remind print output suitable for rem2ps. rem2ps by default prints the output to standard output, so it must be redirected to a file so it can be opened by a program like evince.

Postscript files can be converted with ps2pdf. Ps2pdf is provided by ghostscript which is available in the official repositories.

See also