CLI to Google Calendar

After a few weeks of missing my old cli access to Google Calendar, and pushing the Try It! button with no success (yes, I customized it, but no, what I tried didn't work for me), I went looking (again) for another tool.

Hurrah! Look to gcalcli!

First I tried "pip install gcalcli; pip install vobject parsedatetime" but "which gcalcli" came up empty. I read the log file mentioned at the end of the pip install, ran a search on the most obvious error message, and re-ran it with sudo. Now it's working! I recommend "gcalcli list" to start.

The command I expect to use most often is

gcalcli --calendar 'Calendar' --title 'what is it' --where there --when '12/19/2014 10:00 PM' --duration 60 --description 'yay for description field finally!' add --details url

, and next

gcalcli --calendar 'Calendar' quick 'quick add text' --details url

(possibly). I have always wanted to be able to populate the description from the command line, but APIv2 only supported what's in Quick Add. Now that I've got another easy tool, I can forgive APIv3 for moving my cheese since it supports a feature I wanted.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to pound on this new command line tool ...

Update: Oh, it works so well! I start at Spot the Station, I remove the irrelevant lines (too early, too short, or too low) with PrintWhatYouLike, and then I copy the remaining (relevant) lines.

That then becomes the starting point to fun with regular expressions! Although pbpaste is a Mac OS X tool hailing back to the NeXT days, Linux has tools like xsel and xclip that I hope are roughly equivalent.

clear; pbpaste | awk -F $'\t' '{ print "gcalcli --calendar \"Calendar Name\" --title \"ISS sighting\" --where \"Durham, NC\" --reminder 20 --when \""$1"\" --duration "$2" --description \""$3" max elevation, "$4" approach, "$5" depart\" add --details url" }' | sed 's/\ min\ /\ /g;s/\ above/°\ above/g'; echo

I like to glance at the commands before running them, just to be sure I haven't made some hideous formatting error about to be replicated at the speed of automation, and I like to check at least one of the resulting URIs to be sure the calendar entry survived the transfer. So far, so great!