sdep

A simple “date+event” line parser.

sdep follows the UNIX philosphy (do one thing well, use stdin and stdout) and is heavily inspired by suckless utilities such as dmenu.

You can wrap it around shell scripts to turn it into a no-nonsense calendar system.

Description

sdep reads lines of the form date text from stdin and writes to stdout those lines such that date is between the two dates specified with the -f and -t options, both of which default to the current minute.

The format for date can be specified with the same syntax as for date(1). The dates should correspond to a unique minute in time.

Installation

1. Either clone the repository or download the latest release version from the releases folder (warning: the release archive does not contain the customization scripts).
2. Edit the Makefile to match your local configuration and type make install.

Examples

If events.txt contains lines formatted as date text then

sdep <events.txt

will print all lines whose date match the current minute. Instead

sdep -f <events.txt

will print all the lines whose date is in the past, while

sdep -t -w "%A" <events.txt

will print all lines whose date is in the future, showing only the day of the week and the text.

sdep -f "1999-01-01 00:00" -t "1999-12-31 23:59" -w "" <events.txt

will show only the text of all lines with a date in 1999. You can specify a different format for the dates, for example

sdep +"%m/%d/%Y %I:%M%p" -t "12/31/2020 11:59pm" -w "" <events.txt

will match all dates from December 31st, 2020, one minute before midnight (included). Note: this only works if your locale has an am/pm format, see date(1).

A stupidly simple calendar app

If you keep your events and reminders in a simple plain text file (say events.txt), you can run

sdep -w "" -s "" | while read text; do notify-send "$text"; done < events.txt

every minute, for example using cron(8), to get a notification every time an events is happens.

You can use sdep -f -t < events.txt to list all your events, or sdep -t < events.txt to list only the future ones. You can specify any date range. Running

temp = $(mktemp)
sdep -t <events.txt >"$temp"
mv "$temp" events.txt

will remove all old events from your file.

You can edit your events using any text editor and you can keep them synced between multiple devices using something like rsync.

Scripts

The scripts folder contains the few scripts that I use. They are basically just a more elaborate version of the calendar system described above, with support for recurring events (e.g. weekly, daily). You can install them with sudo SD=/path/to/scripts/folder make scripts, where SD specifies the path where the directory where you want your sdep files to be saved; for example it can be /home/username/.sdep. For example check that the folder SDEPDATA in Makefile suits you.

Most of the scripts rely on the -d option of the GNU date utility, so you should change that too if you are on a BSD system or on MacOS.

Version history

Version	Release date	Comment
0.2	2023-05-23	Minor fixes
0.1	2021-05-08	Initial release