There are many customizations that you can use to make the calendar and diary suit your personal tastes.
If you set the variable
view-diary-entries-initially to t,
calling up the calendar automatically displays the diary entries
for the current date as well. The diary dates appear only if the
current date is visible. If you add both of the following lines to
your `.emacs' file:
(setq view-diary-entries-initially t) (calendar)
this displays both the calendar and diary windows whenever you start Emacs.
Similarly, if you set the
variable view-calendar-holidays-initially to
t, entering the calendar automatically displays a list
of holidays for the current three-month period. The holiday list
appears in a separate window.
You can set the variable
mark-diary-entries-in-calendar to t in
order to mark any dates with diary entries. This takes effect
whenever the calendar window contents are recomputed. There are two
ways of marking these dates: by changing the face (see section Faces), if the display supports that,
or by placing a plus sign (`+') beside the date
otherwise.
Similarly, setting the
variable mark-holidays-in-calendar to t
marks holiday dates, either with a change of face or with an
asterisk (`*').
The variable
calendar-holiday-marker specifies how to mark a date
as being a holiday. Its value may be a character to insert next to
the date, or a face name to use for displaying the date. Likewise,
the variable diary-entry-marker specifies how to mark
a date that has diary entries. The calendar creates faces named
holiday-face and diary-face for these
purposes; those symbols are the default values of these variables,
when Emacs supports multiple faces on your terminal.
The variable
calendar-load-hook is a normal hook run when the
calendar package is first loaded (before actually starting to
display the calendar).
Starting the calendar runs
the normal hook initial-calendar-window-hook.
Recomputation of the calendar display does not run this hook. But
if you leave the calendar with the q command and reenter
it, the hook runs again.
The variable
today-visible-calendar-hook is a normal hook run after
the calendar buffer has been prepared with the calendar when the
current date is visible in the window. One use of this hook is to
replace today's date with asterisks; to do that, use the hook
function calendar-star-date.
(add-hook 'today-visible-calendar-hook 'calendar-star-date)
Another standard hook function marks the current date, either by changing its face or by adding an asterisk. Here's how to use it:
(add-hook 'today-visible-calendar-hook 'calendar-mark-today)
The variable
calendar-today-marker specifies how to mark today's
date. Its value should be a character to insert next to the date or
a face name to use for displaying the date. A face named
calendar-today-face is provided for this purpose; that
symbol is the default for this variable when Emacs supports
multiple faces on your terminal.
A similar normal hook,
today-invisible-calendar-hook is run if the current
date is not visible in the window.
Emacs knows about holidays defined
by entries on one of several lists. You can customize these lists
of holidays to your own needs, adding or deleting holidays. The
lists of holidays that Emacs uses are for general holidays
(general-holidays), local holidays
(local-holidays), Christian holidays
(christian-holidays), Hebrew (Jewish) holidays
(hebrew-holidays), Islamic (Moslem) holidays
(islamic-holidays), and other holidays
(other-holidays).
The general holidays are, by
default, holidays common throughout the United States. To eliminate
these holidays, set general-holidays to
nil.
There are no default local
holidays (but sites may supply some). You can set the variable
local-holidays to any list of holidays, as described
below.
By default,
Emacs does not include all the holidays of the religions that it
knows, only those commonly found in secular calendars. For a more
extensive collection of religious holidays, you can set any (or
all) of the variables all-christian-calendar-holidays,
all-hebrew-calendar-holidays, or
all-islamic-calendar-holidays to t. If
you want to eliminate the religious holidays, set any or all of the
corresponding variables christian-holidays,
hebrew-holidays, and islamic-holidays to
nil.
You can set the variable
other-holidays to any list of holidays. This list,
normally empty, is intended for individual use.
Each of the lists
(general-holidays, local-holidays,
christian-holidays, hebrew-holidays,
islamic-holidays, and other-holidays) is
a list of holiday forms, each holiday form describing a
holiday (or sometimes a list of holidays).
Here is a table of the possible kinds of holiday form. Day numbers and month numbers count starting from 1, but "dayname" numbers count Sunday as 0. The element string is always the name of the holiday, as a string.
(holiday-fixed month day
string)(holiday-float month dayname
k string)(holiday-hebrew month day
string)(holiday-islamic month day
string)(holiday-julian month day
string)(holiday-sexp sexp
string)year to compute and
return the date of a holiday, or nil if the holiday
doesn't happen this year. The value of sexp must
represent the date as a list of the form (month
day year).
(if condition
holiday-form)(function [args])For example, suppose you want to add Bastille Day, celebrated in France on July 14. You can do this as follows:
(setq other-holidays '((holiday-fixed 7 14 "Bastille Day")))
The holiday form (holiday-fixed 7 14 "Bastille
Day") specifies the fourteenth day of the seventh month
(July).
Many holidays occur on a specific day of the week, at a specific time of month. Here is a holiday form describing Hurricane Supplication Day, celebrated in the Virgin Islands on the fourth Monday in August:
(holiday-float 8 1 4 "Hurricane Supplication Day")
Here the 8 specifies August, the 1 specifies Monday (Sunday is 0, Tuesday is 2, and so on), and the 4 specifies the fourth occurrence in the month (1 specifies the first occurrence, 2 the second occurrence, -1 the last occurrence, -2 the second-to-last occurrence, and so on).
You can specify holidays that occur on fixed days of the Hebrew, Islamic, and Julian calendars too. For example,
(setq other-holidays
'((holiday-hebrew 10 2 "Last day of Hanukkah")
(holiday-islamic 3 12 "Mohammed's Birthday")
(holiday-julian 4 2 "Jefferson's Birthday")))
adds the last day of Hanukkah (since the Hebrew months are numbered with 1 starting from Nisan), the Islamic feast celebrating Mohammed's birthday (since the Islamic months are numbered from 1 starting with Muharram), and Thomas Jefferson's birthday, which is 2 April 1743 on the Julian calendar.
To include a holiday conditionally, use either Emacs Lisp's
if or the holiday-sexp form. For example,
American presidential elections occur on the first Tuesday after
the first Monday in November of years divisible by 4:
(holiday-sexp (if (= 0 (% year 4))
(calendar-gregorian-from-absolute
(1+ (calendar-dayname-on-or-before
1 (+ 6 (calendar-absolute-from-gregorian
(list 11 1 year))))))
"US Presidential Election"))
or
(if (= 0 (% displayed-year 4))
(fixed 11
(extract-calendar-day
(calendar-gregorian-from-absolute
(1+ (calendar-dayname-on-or-before
1 (+ 6 (calendar-absolute-from-gregorian
(list 11 1 displayed-year)))))))
"US Presidential Election"))
Some holidays just don't fit into any of these forms because
special calculations are involved in their determination. In such
cases you must write a Lisp function to do the calculation. To
include eclipses, for example, add (eclipses) to
other-holidays and write an Emacs Lisp function
eclipses that returns a (possibly empty) list of the
relevant Gregorian dates among the range visible in the calendar
window, with descriptive strings, like this:
(((6 27 1991) "Lunar Eclipse") ((7 11 1991) "Solar Eclipse") ... )
You can customize the manner of displaying dates in the diary,
in mode lines, and in messages by setting
calendar-date-display-form. This variable holds a list
of expressions that can involve the variables month,
day, and year, which are all numbers in
string form, and monthname and dayname,
which are both alphabetic strings. In the American style, the
default value of this list is as follows:
((if dayname (concat dayname ", ")) monthname " " day ", " year)
while in the European style this value is the default:
((if dayname (concat dayname ", ")) day " " monthname " " year)
The ISO standard date representation is this:
(year "-" month "-" day)
This specifies a typical American format:
(month "/" day "/" (substring year -2))
The calendar and diary by default display times of day in the
conventional American style with the hours from 1 through 12,
minutes, and either `am' or `pm'. If you
prefer the European style, also known in the US as military, in
which the hours go from 00 to 23, you can alter the variable
calendar-time-display-form. This variable is a list of
expressions that can involve the variables 12-hours,
24-hours, and minutes, which are all
numbers in string form, and am-pm and
time-zone, which are both alphabetic strings. The
default value of calendar-time-display-form is as
follows:
(12-hours ":" minutes am-pm
(if time-zone " (") time-zone (if time-zone ")"))
Here is a value that provides European style times:
(24-hours ":" minutes
(if time-zone " (") time-zone (if time-zone ")"))
Emacs understands the difference between standard time and daylight savings time--the times given for sunrise, sunset, solstices, equinoxes, and the phases of the moon take that into account. The rules for daylight savings time vary from place to place and have also varied historically from year to year. To do the job properly, Emacs needs to know which rules to use.
Some operating systems keep track of the rules that apply to the place where you are; on these systems, Emacs gets the information it needs from the system automatically. If some or all of this information is missing, Emacs fills in the gaps with the rules currently used in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the center of GNU's world.
If the default choice of rules is not
appropriate for your location, you can tell Emacs the rules to use
by setting the variables
calendar-daylight-savings-starts and
calendar-daylight-savings-ends. Their values should be
Lisp expressions that refer to the variable year, and
evaluate to the Gregorian date on which daylight savings time
starts or (respectively) ends, in the form of a list
(month day year). The
values should be nil if your area does not use
daylight savings time.
Emacs uses these expressions to determine the start and end dates of daylight savings time as holidays and for correcting times of day in the solar and lunar calculations.
The values for Cambridge, Massachusetts are as follows:
(calendar-nth-named-day 1 0 4 year) (calendar-nth-named-day -1 0 10 year)
i.e., the first 0th day (Sunday) of the fourth month (April) in
the year specified by year, and the last Sunday of the
tenth month (October) of that year. If daylight savings time were
changed to start on October 1, you would set
calendar-daylight-savings-starts to this:
(list 10 1 year)
For a more complex example, suppose daylight savings time begins
on the first of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar. You should set
calendar-daylight-savings-starts to this value:
(calendar-gregorian-from-absolute
(calendar-absolute-from-hebrew
(list 1 1 (+ year 3760))))
because Nisan is the first month in the Hebrew calendar and the Hebrew year differs from the Gregorian year by 3760 at Nisan.
If there is no daylight savings time at your location, or if you
want all times in standard time, set
calendar-daylight-savings-starts and
calendar-daylight-savings-ends to
nil.
The variable
calendar-daylight-time-offset specifies the difference
between daylight savings time and standard time, measured in
minutes. The value for Cambridge is 60.
The variable
calendar-daylight-savings-starts-time and the variable
calendar-daylight-savings-ends-time specify the number
of minutes after midnight local time when the transition to and
from daylight savings time should occur. For Cambridge, both
variables' values are 120.
Ordinarily, the mode line of
the diary buffer window indicates any holidays that fall on the
date of the diary entries. The process of checking for holidays can
take several seconds, so including holiday information delays the
display of the diary buffer noticeably. If you'd prefer to have a
faster display of the diary buffer but without the holiday
information, set the variable holidays-in-diary-buffer
to nil.
The variable
number-of-diary-entries controls the number of days of
diary entries to be displayed at one time. It affects the initial
display when view-diary-entries-initially is
t, as well as the command M-x diary. For
example, the default value is 1, which says to display only the
current day's diary entries. If the value is 2, both the current
day's and the next day's entries are displayed. The value can also
be a vector of seven elements: for example, if the value is
[0 2 2 2 2 4 1] then no diary entries appear on
Sunday, the current date's and the next day's diary entries appear
Monday through Thursday, Friday through Monday's entries appear on
Friday, while on Saturday only that day's entries appear.
The variable
print-diary-entries-hook is a normal hook run after
preparation of a temporary buffer containing just the diary entries
currently visible in the diary buffer. (The other, irrelevant diary
entries are really absent from the temporary buffer; in the diary
buffer, they are merely hidden.) The default value of this hook
does the printing with the command lpr-buffer. If you
want to use a different command to do the printing, just change the
value of this hook. Other uses might include, for example,
rearranging the lines into order by day and time.
You can customize the form
of dates in your diary file, if neither the standard American nor
European styles suits your needs, by setting the variable
diary-date-forms. This variable is a list of patterns
for recognizing a date. Each date pattern is a list whose elements
may be regular expressions (see section Regular Expressions) or the symbols
month, day, year,
monthname, and dayname. All these
elements serve as patterns that match certain kinds of text in the
diary file. In order for the date pattern, as a whole, to match,
all of its elements must match consecutively.
A regular expression in a date pattern matches in its usual fashion, using the standard syntax table altered so that `*' is a word constituent.
The symbols month, day,
year, monthname, and dayname
match the month number, day number, year number, month name, and
day name of the date being considered. The symbols that match
numbers allow leading zeros; those that match names allow
three-letter abbreviations and capitalization. All the symbols can
match `*'; since `*' in a diary entry
means "any day", "any month", and so on, it should match regardless
of the date being considered.
The default value of diary-date-forms in the
American style is this:
((month "/" day "[^/0-9]") (month "/" day "/" year "[^0-9]") (monthname " *" day "[^,0-9]") (monthname " *" day ", *" year "[^0-9]") (dayname "\\W"))
The date patterns in the list must be mutually
exclusive and must not match any portion of the diary entry
itself, just the date and one character of whitespace. If, to be
mutually exclusive, the pattern must match a portion of the diary
entry text--beyond the whitespace that ends the date--then the
first element of the date pattern must be
backup. This causes the date recognizer to back up to
the beginning of the current word of the diary entry, after
finishing the match. Even if you use backup, the date
pattern must absolutely not match more than a portion of the first
word of the diary entry. The default value of
diary-date-forms in the European style is this
list:
((day "/" month "[^/0-9]") (day "/" month "/" year "[^0-9]") (backup day " *" monthname "\\W+\\<[^*0-9]") (day " *" monthname " *" year "[^0-9]") (dayname "\\W"))
Notice the use of backup in the third pattern,
because it needs to match part of a word beyond the date itself to
distinguish it from the fourth pattern.
Your diary file can have entries based on Hebrew or Islamic dates, as well as entries based on the world-standard Gregorian calendar. However, because recognition of such entries is time-consuming and most people don't use them, you must explicitly enable their use. If you want the diary to recognize Hebrew-date diary entries, for example, you must do this:
(add-hook 'nongregorian-diary-listing-hook 'list-hebrew-diary-entries) (add-hook 'nongregorian-diary-marking-hook 'mark-hebrew-diary-entries)
If you want Islamic-date entries, do this:
(add-hook 'nongregorian-diary-listing-hook 'list-islamic-diary-entries) (add-hook 'nongregorian-diary-marking-hook 'mark-islamic-diary-entries)
Hebrew- and Islamic-date diary entries have the same formats as Gregorian-date diary entries, except that `H' precedes a Hebrew date and `I' precedes an Islamic date. Moreover, because the Hebrew and Islamic month names are not uniquely specified by the first three letters, you may not abbreviate them. For example, a diary entry for the Hebrew date Heshvan 25 could look like this:
HHeshvan 25 Happy Hebrew birthday!
and would appear in the diary for any date that corresponds to Heshvan 25 on the Hebrew calendar. And here is an Islamic-date diary entry that matches Dhu al-Qada 25:
IDhu al-Qada 25 Happy Islamic birthday!
As with Gregorian-date diary entries, Hebrew- and Islamic-date entries are nonmarking if they are preceded with an ampersand (`&').
Here is a table of commands used in the calendar to create diary entries that match the selected date and other dates that are similar in the Hebrew or Islamic calendar:
insert-hebrew-diary-entry).
insert-monthly-hebrew-diary-entry). This diary entry
matches any date that has the same Hebrew day-within-month as the
selected date.
insert-yearly-hebrew-diary-entry). This diary entry
matches any date which has the same Hebrew month and
day-within-month as the selected date.
insert-islamic-diary-entry).
insert-monthly-islamic-diary-entry).
insert-yearly-islamic-diary-entry).
These commands work much like the corresponding commands for ordinary diary entries: they apply to the date that point is on in the calendar window, and what they do is insert just the date portion of a diary entry at the end of your diary file. You must then insert the rest of the diary entry.
Diary display works by preparing the diary buffer and then
running the hook diary-display-hook. The default value
of this hook (simple-diary-display) hides the
irrelevant diary entries and then displays the buffer. However, if
you specify the hook as follows,
(add-hook 'diary-display-hook 'fancy-diary-display)
this enables fancy diary display. It displays diary entries and holidays by copying them into a special buffer that exists only for the sake of display. Copying to a separate buffer provides an opportunity to change the displayed text to make it prettier--for example, to sort the entries by the dates they apply to.
As with simple diary display, you can print a hard copy of the
buffer with print-diary-entries. To print a hard copy
of a day-by-day diary for a week by positioning point on Sunday of
that week, type 7 d and then do M-x
print-diary-entries. As usual, the inclusion of the holidays
slows down the display slightly; you can speed things up by setting
the variable holidays-in-diary-buffer to
nil.
Ordinarily, the fancy diary
buffer does not show days for which there are no diary entries,
even if that day is a holiday. If you want such days to be shown in
the fancy diary buffer, set the variable
diary-list-include-blanks to t.
If you use the fancy diary
display, you can use the normal hook
list-diary-entries-hook to sort each day's diary
entries by their time of day. Here's how:
(add-hook 'list-diary-entries-hook 'sort-diary-entries t)
For each day, this sorts diary entries that begin with a recognizable time of day according to their times. Diary entries without times come first within each day.
Fancy diary display also has the ability to process included diary files. This permits a group of people to share a diary file for events that apply to all of them. Lines in the diary file of this form:
#include "filename"
includes the diary entries from the file filename in the fancy diary buffer. The include mechanism is recursive, so that included files can include other files, and so on; you must be careful not to have a cycle of inclusions, of course. Here is how to enable the include facility:
(add-hook 'list-diary-entries-hook 'include-other-diary-files) (add-hook 'mark-diary-entries-hook 'mark-included-diary-files)
The include mechanism works only with the fancy diary display, because ordinary diary display shows the entries directly from your diary file.
Sexp diary entries allow you to do more than just have complicated conditions under which a diary entry applies. If you use the fancy diary display, sexp entries can generate the text of the entry depending on the date itself. For example, an anniversary diary entry can insert the number of years since the anniversary date into the text of the diary entry. Thus the `%d' in this dairy entry:
%%(diary-anniversary 10 31 1948) Arthur's birthday (%d years old)
gets replaced by the age, so on October 31, 1990 the entry appears in the fancy diary buffer like this:
Arthur's birthday (42 years old)
If the diary file instead contains this entry:
%%(diary-anniversary 10 31 1948) Arthur's %d%s birthday
the entry in the fancy diary buffer for October 31, 1990 appears like this:
Arthur's 42nd birthday
Similarly, cyclic diary entries can interpolate the number of repetitions that have occurred:
%%(diary-cyclic 50 1 1 1990) Renew medication (%d%s time)
looks like this:
Renew medication (5th time)
in the fancy diary display on September 8, 1990.
There is an early reminder diary sexp that includes its entry in the diary not only on the date of occurrence, but also on earlier dates. For example, if you want a reminder a week before your anniversary, you can use
%%(diary-remind '(diary-anniversary 12 22 1968) 7) Ed's anniversary
and the fancy diary will show
Ruth & Ed's anniversary
both on December 15 and on December 22.
The function
diary-date applies to dates described by a month, day,
year combination, each of which can be an integer, a list of
integers, or t. The value t means all
values. For example,
%%(diary-date '(10 11 12) 22 t) Rake leaves
causes the fancy diary to show
Rake leaves
on October 22, November 22, and December 22 of every year.
The function
diary-float allows you to describe diary entries that
apply to dates like the third Friday of November, or the last
Tuesday in April. The parameters are the month,
dayname, and an index n. The entry appears on
the nth dayname of month, where
dayname=0 means Sunday, 1 means Monday, and so on. If
n is negative it counts backward from the end of
month. The value of month can be a list of
months, a single month, or t to specify all months.
You can also use an optional parameter day to specify
the nth dayname of month on or
after/before day; the value of day defaults
to 1 if n is positive and to the last day of
month if n is negative. For example,
%%(diary-float t 1 -1) Pay rent
causes the fancy diary to show
Pay rent
on the last Monday of every month.
The generality of sexp diary entries lets you specify any diary
entry that you can describe algorithmically. A sexp diary entry
contains an expression that computes whether the entry applies to
any given date. If its value is non-nil, the entry
applies to that date; otherwise, it does not. The expression can
use the variable date to find the date being
considered; its value is a list (month day
year) that refers to the Gregorian calendar.
Suppose you get paid on the 21st of the month if it is a weekday, and on the Friday before if the 21st is on a weekend. Here is how to write a sexp diary entry that matches those dates:
&%%(let ((dayname (calendar-day-of-week date))
(day (car (cdr date))))
(or (and (= day 21) (memq dayname '(1 2 3 4 5)))
(and (memq day '(19 20)) (= dayname 5)))
) Pay check deposited
The following sexp diary entries take advantage of the ability (in the fancy diary display) to concoct diary entries whose text varies based on the date:
%%(diary-sunrise-sunset)%%(diary-phases-of-moon)%%(diary-day-of-year)%%(diary-iso-date)%%(diary-julian-date)%%(diary-astro-day-number)%%(diary-hebrew-date)%%(diary-islamic-date)%%(diary-french-date)%%(diary-mayan-date)Thus including the diary entry
&%%(diary-hebrew-date)
causes every day's diary display to contain the equivalent date on the Hebrew calendar, if you are using the fancy diary display. (With simple diary display, the line `&%%(diary-hebrew-date)' appears in the diary for any date, but does nothing particularly useful.)
These functions can be used to construct sexp diary entries based on the Hebrew calendar in certain standard ways:
%%(diary-rosh-hodesh)%%(diary-parasha)%%(diary-sabbath-candles)%%(diary-omer)%%(diary-yahrzeit month day
year) nameYou can specify exactly how Emacs reminds you of an appointment, and how far in advance it begins doing so, by setting these variables:
appt-message-warning-timeappt-audiblenil, Emacs rings the terminal bell
for appointment reminders. The default is t.
appt-visiblenil, Emacs displays the appointment
message in the echo area. The default is t.
appt-display-mode-linenil, Emacs displays the number of
minutes to the appointment on the mode line. The default is
t.
appt-msg-windownil, Emacs displays the appointment
message in another window. The default is t.
appt-disp-window-functionappt-delete-window-functionappt-display-duration