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)
they display 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 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 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 theses lists of holidays to your own needs, adding
holidays or deleting lists of 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 day-within-week 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 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).
(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, all numbers in string form, and monthname and
dayname, 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, all numbers in
string form, and am-pm and time-zone, 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 certain variables.
These variables are calendar-daylight-savings-starts together
with 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 starting date of daylight savings time for the holiday list 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: 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 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 which 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)
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.
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 to 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 in 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) name
You can specify exactly how Emacs reminds you of an appointment and how far in advance it begins doing so. Here are the variables that you can set:
appt-message-warning-time
appt-audible
nil, Emacs rings the
terminal bell for appointment reminders. The default is t.
appt-visible
nil, Emacs displays the appointment
message in echo area. The default is t.
appt-display-mode-line
nil, Emacs displays the number of minutes
to the appointment on the mode line. The default is t.
appt-msg-window
nil, Emacs displays the appointment
message in another window. The default is t.
appt-disp-window-function
appt-delete-window-function
appt-display-duration