Saturday, August 03, 2013

How to get a reasonable plaintext listing of calendar events using Google Calendar or OS X Calendar.app

I despise Outlook as much as any other geek, but, damn, there are things I miss when I'm on my Mac with Google Calendar and/or Mountain Lion Calendar.

To put it delicately, calendaring on the Mac is a flaming wad of misery. Google is only a little better. Simple tasks, like a plaintext agenda view one's Calendar, are mysterious or impossible on the modern Mac. (Classic had much better Calendar tools.)

Here's one way to get a plaintext agenda list from Google Calendar.

  1. From Calendar list go to Calendar Settings.
  2. In Calendar Details click on HTML to get web view of your calendar. Go to Agenda view and you can now select a range of dates and paste into your preferred text editor.

For extra points, you can use the top-secret multiple-calendar web sharing feature and get events from more than one calendar.

Update 8/4/13

In Calendar.app Day view you can:

  • Select Calendar
  • Click mini-calendar for start date
  • Click on an event at start of that day
  • Click mini-calendar for end date
  • Shift-click on event at end
  • Paste into text editor

The result is pretty much the same as using Google Calendar.

Or you can search on either '.' or "Kind:Event" in Calendar and select a range from the search results. The '.' search works in Google Calendar too, though in 10/2020 it gCal mysteriously omits some dates from some feeds.

Update 8/4/13b:

iCalBuddy is a terminal app that can "get lists of events and tasks/to-do's from the OS X calendar database"; results can be displayed on the desktop. It was very recently updated, so should be fine on Mountain Lion.

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