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WHEN(1) When 1.1.45 WHEN(1)

NAME
When - a minimalistic personal calendar program

SYNOPSIS
when

when [options] [commands]

The basic idea is just to type `when' at the command line. The first time
you run the program, it will prompt you for some setup information. To edit
you calendar file in your favorite editor, do `when e'. The basic format of
the calendar file is like this:

2003 feb 3 , Fly to Stockholm to accept Nobel Prize.

Once you have a calendar file, running the program as plain old `when' from
the command line will print out the things on your calendar for the next
two weeks.

COMMANDS
i Print upcoming items on your calendar. (This is the default com-
mand.)

c Print calendars (grids like on a wall calendar, not showing items)
for last month, this month, and next month.

e Invoke your favorite editor to edit your calendar file.

w,m,y Print items for the coming week, month, or year, rather than for
the default period of two weeks.

j Print the modified Julian day (useful for finding the time interval
between two dates).

d Print nothing but the current date.

OPTIONS
All of the following options, except --help, can be set in the preferences
file. True/false options can be set on the command line as --option or
--nooption, and in the preferences file by setting the option to 0 or 1.

--help Prints a brief help message.

--version
Prints a brief message, including a statement of what version of
the software it is.

--language=LANG
Set the language to LANG. See the section below on international-
ization. This option is not normally needed, because the language
is automatically detected.

--future=DAYS
How many days into the future the report extends. Default: 14

--past=DAYS
How many days into the past the report extends. Like the --future
option, --past is interpreted as an offset relative to the present
date, so normally you would want this to be a negative value. De-
fault: -1

--calendar=FILE
Your calendar file. The default is to use the file pointed to by
your preferences file, which is set up the first time you run When.

--editor=COMMAND
Command used to invoke your editor. Default: "emacs -nw" Example:
when --editor="vim"

--wrap=COLUMNS
Number of columns of text for the output (or 0 if you don't want
wrapping at all). Default: 80

--[no]wrap_auto
Attempt to detect the width of the terminal, and set the width of
the output accordingly. This applies only if the output is a tty,
and is subject to any maximum set by --wrap_max. Overrides any
value set by --wrap. Default: no

--wrap_max=COLUMNS
Maximum number of columns of text for the output (or -1 if you
don't want any maximum). Useful in combination with --wrap_auto to
preserve legibility on very large terminal windows. Default: -1

--rows=ROWS
Number of rows of text that will fit in the terminal window. When
listing your calendar, output will be truncated to this length, un-
less that would result in listing less than three days into the fu-
ture. This behavior is overridden (the maximum number of rows is
set to infinity) if the --future option is given explicitly, or if
the m or y command is used. To make this option have an effect, you
will normally need to use --norows_auto as well. Default: 40

--[no]rows_auto
Attempt to detect the height of the terminal, rather than using the
value set in the --rows option. This applies only if the output is
a tty. Overrides any value set by --rows. Default: yes

--[no]header
Print headers at the top of the output of the i, c, w, m and y com-
mands. Default: yes

--[no]paging
When the output is longer than the value set by rows or rows_auto,
use a pager to display the output. (The PAGER and LESS environment
variables are respected. If PAGER isn't set, the default is
"less.") Default: yes

--paging_less_options
Extra options if the pager is "less." Default: "-rXFE"

--[no]filter_accents_on_output
Whether to change accented characters to unaccented ones. Default:
yes, unless the $TERM environment variable equals "mlterm" or
"xterm".

--[no]styled_output
If the output is a terminal, should we use ANSI terminal codes for
styling? Default: yes

--[no]styled_output_if_not_tty
Style the output even if it's not a terminal. Default: no

--calendar_today_style=STYLE
--items_today_style=STYLE
The first of these says how to style today's date when doing the
calendar (c) command. The second says how to style the word ``to-
day'' when doing the items (i) command. Defaults: bold

The styling of output can be specified using the following key-
words: bold, underlined, flashing. To change the color of the
text, use these: fgblack, fgred, fggreen, fgyellow, fgblue, fgpur-
ple, fgcyan, fgwhite. To change the background color, use similar
keywords, but with bg instead of fg. Example: when --calendar_to-
day_style="bold,fgred,bgcyan" c

--prefilter
Pipe the calendar file through a program before reading it. De-
fault: ""

--now="Y M D"
Pretend today is some other date.

--[no]neighboring_months
The default behavior of "when c" is to print out calendars for last
month, this month, and next month. By choosing --noneighbor-
ing_months, you can avoid printing out months not included in the
range set by --past and --future.

--[no]monday_first
Start the week from Monday, rather than Sunday. Default: no

--[no]orthodox_easter
Calculate Easter according to the Orthodox Eastern Church's calen-
dar. Default: no

--[no]ampm
Display the time of day using 12-hour time, rather than 24-hour
time. Also affects the parsing of input times. Default: yes

--auto_pm=x
When times are input with hours that are less than x, and AM or PM
is not explicitly specified, automatically assume that they are PM
rather than AM. Default: 0

--[no]literal_only
Only display items that are given as literal dates, e.g., "2008 jul
4". Don't display items that are defined by expressions, e.g., pe-
riodic items like "w=thu". Default: no

--test_expression
--bare_version
--make_filter_regex
--test_accent_filtering
These options are used internally for building and testing.

DESCRIPTION
When is an extremely simple personal calendar program, aimed at the Unix
geek who wants something minimalistic. It can keep track of things you need
to do on particular dates. There are a lot of calendar and ``personal in-
formation manager'' programs out there, so what reasons are there to use
When?

It's a very short and simple program, so you can easily tinker with it
yourself. When is about 2400 lines of Perl code (not counting documenta-
tion), whereas for example the command-line calendar Khal is 17,000, and
Calcurse is 24,000.
It doesn't depend on any libraries, so it's easy to install. You should be
able to install it on any system where Perl is available, even if you don't
have privileges for installing libraries.
Its file format is a simple text file, which you can edit in your favorite
editor.

Although When should run on virtually any operating system where Perl is
available, in this document I'll assume you're running some flavor of Unix.

INSTALLATION AND GETTING STARTED
While logged in as root, execute the following command:

make install

Run When for the first time using this command:

when

You'll be prompted for some information needed to set up your calendar
file.

USE
If you run When again after the initial setup run, it should print out a
single line of text, telling you the current date. It won't print out any-
thing else, because your calendar file is empty, so you don't have any ap-
pointments coming up.

Now you can start putting items in your calendar file. Each item is a line
of text that looks like this:

2003 feb 3 , Fly to Stockholm to accept Nobel Prize.

A convenient way to edit your calendar file is with this command:

when e

This pops you into your favorite editor (the one you chose when you ran
When for the first time).

The date has to be in year-month-day format, but you can either spell the
month or give it as a number. (Month names are case-insensitive, and it
doesn't matter if you represent February as F, Fe, Feb, Februa, or what-
ever. It just has to be a unique match. You can give a trailing ., which
will be ignored. In Czech, "cer" can be used as an abbreviation for Cerven,
and "cec" for Cervenec.) Extra whitespace is ignored until you get into the
actual text after the comma. Blank lines and lines beginning with a # sign
are ignored.

If you now run When, it will print out a list of all the items in your cal-
endar file that fall within a certain time interval. (The interval starts
from yesterday. When tries to pick the end of the time interval so that its
output fits on your terminal window, but it will always be at least three
days, and no more than two weeks in the future.) To see all your items for
the next month, do ``when m'', and similarly for a year, y, or a single
week, w.

If you do ``when c'', When prints out calendars for last month, this month,
and next month.

You can combine these commands. For instance, ``when cw'' will print out
calendars, and then show you your items for the next week.

For events that occur once a year, such as birthdays and anniversaries, you
can either use a * in place of the year,

* dec 25 , Christmas

or use a year with an asterisk:

1920* aug 29 , Charlie Parker turns \a, born in \y

In the second example, \a tells you how old Charlie Parker would be this
year, and \y reproduces the year he was born, i.e., the output would be:

today 2003 Aug 29 Charlie Parker turns 83, born in 1920

For things you have to do every week, you can use an expression of the form
w=xxx, where xxx is the first few letters of the name of the day of the
week in your language. (You have to supply enough letters to eliminate am-
biguity, e.g., in English, w=th or w=tu, not just w=t.) Example:

w=sun , go to church, 10:00

You can actually do fancier tests than this as well; for more information,
see the section 'fancy tests' below. Here's how to set up some common hol-
idays:

m=jan & w=mon & a=3 , Martin Luther King Day
* feb 14 , Valentine's Day
m=feb & w=mon & a=3 , Washington's Birthday observed
m=may & w=sun & a=2 , Mother's Day
m=may & w=mon & b=1 , Memorial Day
m=jun & w=sun & a=3 , Father's Day
* jul 4 , Independence Day
m=sep & w=mon & a=1 , Labor Day
m=oct & w=mon & a=2 , Columbus Day
m=nov & w=thu & a=4 , Thanksgiving (U.S.)
m=oct & w=mon & a=2 , Thanksgiving (Canada)
m=may & w=mon & (d>=18 & d<=24) , Victoria Day
* nov 11 , Armistice Day
e=47 , Mardi Gras
e=46 , Ash Wednesday
e=7 , Palm Sunday
e=0 , Easter Sunday
e=0-49 , Pentecost (49 days after easter)

In the U.S., when certain holidays fall on a weekend, federal workers, as
well as many private employees, get a Monday or Friday off. The full list
is given at http://www.opm.gov/operating_status_schedules/fedhol/2011.asp.
If you want a reminder of both the holiday and the day you get off from
work, here's an example of how you would set that up:

* jul 4 , Independence Day
m=jul & c=4 , Independence Day (observed as a federal holiday)

COMMENTS
A line beginning with the # character is taken as a comment, and is ig-
nored. A line consisting only of whitespace characters is also ignored.

INTERNATIONALIZATION
When has at least partial support for Czech, Danish, Dutch, English,
French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish,
Ukrainian and Portuguese. If When has not been translated into your lan-
guage, or has only been partially translated, the text that hasn't been
translated will be displayed in English. When should automatically detect
what language you use (via your $LANG environment variable), and if When
has been translated into that language, that's what you'll get -- When's
output will be in your language, and When will also expect you to use that
language in your calendar file for the names of the months and the days of
the week.

Your calendar file must be in UTF-8 (or ASCII, which is a subset of UTF-8).
If your calendar file is in some other encoding, such as ISO-8859, When
will typically be able to detect that, and will refuse to read it. Com-
mand-line options can also contain UTF-8.

Some terminal emulators (aterm, ...) display accented characters as
garbage, but others (mlterm, xterm...) can display them correctly. When
checks the $TERM environment variable, and if it equals "mlterm" or
"xterm", then accented characters will be displayed. Otherwise, they are
filtered out of the output. You can override this by putting a line like

filter_accents_on_output = 0

filter_accents_on_output = 1

in your preferences file. I'd be interested in hearing from any users who
can suggest a better mechanism for this than attempting to interpret the
$TERM variable.

On input, accents are allowed, but not required, e.g., in a French-language
input file, the date 2005 Fev 17 could be given with an accented e or an
unaccented one, and either will work. If an input month or day of the week
does not match any of the ones for your language, then When will try to in-
terpret it as English instead.

You can put a line like

language = fr

in your preferences file to set your language, or supply the --language op-
tion on the command line, but that's not necessary if your $LANG environ-
ment variable is set correctly.

LOCATION AND FORMAT OF THE PREFERENCES FILE
Most people will have their preferences file in ~/.when/preferences. Those
who prefer to keep their home directory uncluttered with dotfiles can use
one of the following standard possibilities defined by the XDG standard.
In decreasing order of priority: ${WHEN_CONFIG_HOME}/preferences,
${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/when/preferences, $HOME/.config/when/preferences, and
$HOME/.when/preferences.

Each line consists of something like this:

variable = value

Whitespace is ignored everywhere except inside the value. Variable names
are case-insensitive. Blank lines are ignored. Comments are allowed, pref-
aced by #.

MORE EXAMPLES
A useful command to have your shell execute when you log in is this:

when --past=0 --future=1

To print out a calendar for a full year to come:

when --past=0 --future=365 c

POPPING UP YOUR CALENDAR WHEN YOU LOG IN
Your calendar doesn't do you any good if you forget to look at it every
day. An easy way to make it pop up when you log in is to make your .xses-
sion or .xinitrc file look like this:

/usr/bin/when --past=0 --future=1 &>~/when.today
emacs -geometry 70x25 -bg bisque ~/when.today &
startkde

The .xsession file is used if you have a graphical login manager set up on
your machine, the .xinitrc if you don't. In this example, the first line
outputs your calendar to a file. The complete path to the When program is
given, because your shell's path variable will not yet be properly initial-
ized when this runs. The second line pops up a GUI emacs window, which is
distinctively colored so that it will catch your eye. The last line starts
your window manager, KDE in this example. Whatever window manager you use,
just make sure to retain the preexisting line in the file that starts it,
and make sure that that line is the very last one in the file.

SORTING BY TIME OF DAY
If you want the various items that lie on a single day to be printed out in
a certain order, the simplest way to do it is to put them in that order in
the input file. That method won't work, however, when some of the items lie
on dates that are determined by expressions rather than given explicitly.
The most common reason for wanting to do this kind of thing is that you
have things you need to do at certain times during the day, and you want
them sorted out by time. In this situation, you can give a time at the be-
ginning of the item's text, and When will recognize that and sort the items
by time. Times can be in h:mm or hh:mm format. If --ampm is set, then an
optional suffix a or p can be used for AM or PM, e.g., 9:30a for 9:30 AM.
If you use AM/PM time, then you can also, e.g., set --auto_pm=9 so that
hours less than 9 are automatically assumed to be PM. Here is an example:

2010 apr 25 , 7:00 dinner at the anarcho-syndicalist commune
w=sun , 10:00 church

April 25, 2010 is a Sunday, so on that date both of these items will be
displayed. If --auto_pm is set to 8 or higher, then the 7:00 will automat-
ically be interpreted as 7:00 PM, and the dinner date will be displayed be-
low the morning church ceremony.

FANCY TESTS
In addition to w, discussed above, there are a bunch of other variables you
can test:

w - day of the week
m - month
d - day of the month
y - year
j - modified Julian day number
a - 1 for the first 7 days of the month, 2 for the next 7, etc.
b - 1 for the last 7 days of the month, 2 for the previous 7, etc.
c - on Monday or Friday, equals the day of the month of the nearest weekend day; otherwise -1
n - number of days in this month
e - days until this year's (Western) Easter
z - day of the year (1 on New Year's day)

You can specify months either as numbers, m=2, or as names in your lan-
guage, m=feb. You can also use the logical operators & (and) and | (or).
The following example reminds you to pay your employees on the first and
fifteenth day of every month:

d=1 | d=15 , Pay employees.

This example reminds you to rehearse with your band on the last Saturday of
every month:

w=sat & b=1 , Rehearse with band.

The following two lines

* dec 25 , Christmas
m=dec & d=25 , Christmas

both do exactly the same thing, but the first version is easier to under-
stand and makes the program run faster. (When you do a test, When has to
run through every day in the range of dates you asked for, and evaluate the
test for each of those days. On my machine, if I print out a calendar for a
whole year, using a file with 10 simple tests in it, it takes a few sec-
onds.) Parentheses can be used, too.

Depending on your nationality and religion, you probably have a bunch of
holidays that don't lie on fixed dates. In Christianity, many of these (the
"movable feasts") are calculated relative to Easter Sunday, which is why
the e variable is useful.

There is a not operator, !:

w=fri & !(m=dec & d=25) , poker game

There is a modulo operator, %, and a subtraction operator, -. Using these,
along with the j variable, it is just barely possible for When's little
parser to perform the following feat:

!(j%14-1) , do something every other Wednesday

The logic behind this silly little piece of wizardry goes like this.
First, we determine, using the command `when j --now="2005 jan 26"', that
the first Wednesday on which we want to do this has a Julian day that
equals 1, modulo 14. Then we write this expression so that if it's a
Wednesday whose Julian day equals 1, modulo 14, the quantity in parentheses
will be zero, and taking its logical negation will yield a true value.

The operators' associativity and order of priority (from highest to lowest)
is like this:

left %
left -
left < > <= >=
left = !=
right !
left &
left |

INCLUDING FILES
If your calendar file gets too large, you may prefer to split it up into
smaller chunks -- perhaps one for birthdays, one for Tibetan holidays, etc.
An easy way of accomplishing this is to install the program m4, put the
line

prefilter = m4 -P

in your preferences file, and then put lines in your calendar file like
this:

m4_include(/home/yourname/.when/birthdays)

ENVIRONMENT
$LANG to automatically detect the user's language

$TERM to try to figure out if the terminal emulator can display accented
characters

FILES
$HOME/.when/calendar - The default location for the user's calendar
(pointed to by the preferences file)

$HOME/.when/preferences - The user's preferences. (See above for alterna-
tive locations, which follow the XDG standard.)

BUGS
The filename of the calendar file cannot have unicode in it. This is be-
cause perl's File::Glob::glob() function does not support unicode properly.
See http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/Porting/todo.pod and
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18436275/should-perls-fileglob-al-
ways-be-post-filtered-through-utf8decode .

OTHER INFORMATION
When's web page is at

http://www.lightandmatter.com/when/when.html ,

where you can always find the latest version of the software.

AUTHOR
When was written by Ben Crowell, http://www.lightandmatter.com/personal/.
Dimiter Trendafilov wrote the new and improved parser for date expressions.

When is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the GPL, or, optionally, Perl's license.

1.1.45 2026-08-04 WHEN(1)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=when&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>

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