On 23.05.19 17:12, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Thu, 23 May 2019 10:44:00 -0400
> Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:
>
> > I'm looking for software to handle appointment calendars, contact
> > lists, and todo lists.
>
> VimOutliner is how you handle todo lists. It even has branch-wide
> completion statistics. Debian has a VimOutliner package, so I'd assume
> Devuan does too. If the package doesn't work, I can send you a 0.35
> tarball.

Here, during decades of managing software projects, the project schedule
was coarse-grain, meeting action-point lists supplemented, and a few
to-self emails logged to-do items in the same place as meeting minutes
arrived.

> I use Vim for contact lists. It's about as freeform as you can get. If
> you wanted more structure, you could use VimOutliner.

About 30 years ago I cobbled up a simple shell function to search a
vim-edited file for the submitted name or keyword. Keywords placed after
a '|' are elided from the output. Case is ignored in the search, to save
having to press <Shift>.

t () 
{ 
    gawk -v RS="" -v IGNORECASE=1 '
     /'$1'/ { split($0,A,/\|/); printf("\n%s\n",A[1])}' ~/Personal/info/Contacts
}

It serves to this day. I've not needed to break the list into
categories for a more structured search, or add anything else so far.

> I don't know what "calendaring" is, but I use my own home-grown
> reminder system. Four times a day it pops up and tells me how many days
> it is til I have to do something. The days the reminders pop up are
> completely configurable. I run it from my

For nearly as long as the above, I've used standard "calendar". By
default, it flags an event on the day. That's a bit late for birthday
cards or a seminar in the next state. So I run calendar once per day
with a 14 day look-ahead:

# Repeat birthday warnings, and cover days not run, by looking 14 days into the future.
x=`calendar -l 14 -f ~/Personal/domestic/calendar`
( [ -n "$x" ] && echo "$x" | mail -s "$x" erik )

Notification is by email, which serves as my to-do list, avoiding the
need to look in several places to ascertain task priority.

Two services, serving for three decades, for three lines of script, is a
pretty good return on effort, I figure.

...
> > Yes, I realise I may not find an ideal one. I'm open to wriging my
> > own if necessary,
>
> Writing your own is how you get the workflow you really want.

Yes. A glove-like fit lets it comfortably serve for decades.

Erik

-- 
(5)  It is always possible to agglutinate multiple separate problems
     into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases
     this is a bad idea.                                       RFC-1925