Post #2489380

2026-05-11 06:59 UTC

What if your calendar was just a text file? This week I show you how to build a todo.txt-format calendar — which is of practical use all on its own — and optionally view today&#39;s events in your Obsidian daily note. It is inspired by calendar.txt, but it&#39;s not that. Yes, I know Emacs can do it all. It&#39;s not that, either, by design. Medium (includes blog post link) https://miscellaneplans.medium.com/how-to-create-a-plain-text-calendar-with-the-todo-txt-format-41f0ce6f093d Blog https://ellanew.com/2026/05/11/plain-text-calendar-todo-txt #ptpl #PlainText #calendar #obsidian

Replies (4)

@willrc@fosstodon.org 2026-05-11 07:35

@ellane@pkm.social Thanks for sharing this. I might give this a go (always a fan of low-tech solutions to every day problems). What I *definitely* will be doing though, is putting all the metadata for my current organisation system at the front of the item moving forward - it does look so much cleaner!

Open ##2737000
@matcha06@mastodon.social 2026-05-11 12:50

@ellane@pkm.social Another great article! Thank you for taking the time to write it!

Open ##2737004
@gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-05-11 14:29

@ellane@pkm.social while not todo.txt format, I've used remind(1) for quite a while. It also uses a #plaintext DSL for creating calendar events that is more powerful than any other calendar application I've ever used. And being just a CLI application, it plays well with other Unixy tools, allowing for incoming events to be scripted, and output to feed other scripts. https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/

Open ##2737005
@bw@social.lol 2026-05-11 17:15

@ellane@pkm.social Very cool! Do you think you would still use this system if you didn't have Obsidian?

Open ##2737006