Emacs provides the functions of a desk calendar, with a diary of planned or past events. It also has facilities for managing your appointments, and keeping track of how much time you spend working on certain projects.
To enter the calendar, type M-x calendar. This displays a three-month calendar centered on the current month, with point on the current date. With a numeric argument, as in C-u M-x calendar, it prompts you for the month and year to be the center of the three-month calendar. The calendar uses its own buffer, whose major mode is Calendar mode.
mouse-3 in the calendar brings up a menu of operations on a particular date; mouse-2 brings up a menu of commonly used calendar features that are independent of any particular date. To exit the calendar, type q.
Calendar mode provides commands to move through the calendar in logical units of time such as days, weeks, months, and years. If you move outside the months originally displayed, the calendar display scrolls automatically through time to make the selected date visible. Moving to a date lets you view its holidays or diary entries, or convert it to other calendars; moving by long time periods is also useful simply to scroll the calendar.
The commands for movement in the calendar buffer parallel the commands for movement in text. You can move forward and backward by days, weeks, months, and years.
Move point one day forward (calendar-forward-day).
Move point one day backward (calendar-backward-day).
Move point one week forward (calendar-forward-week).
Move point one week backward (calendar-backward-week).
Move point one month forward (calendar-forward-month).
Move point one month backward (calendar-backward-month).
Move point one year forward (calendar-forward-year).
Move point one year backward (calendar-backward-year).
The day and week commands are natural analogues of the usual Emacs
commands for moving by characters and by lines. Just as C-n
usually moves to the same column in the following line, in Calendar
mode it is bound to calendar-forward-week, which moves to the
same day in the following week. And C-p
(calendar-backward-week) moves to the same day in the previous
week. C-f (calendar-forward-day) and C-b
(calendar-backward-day) move forward and back by days.
The arrow keys are equivalent to C-f, C-b, C-n and C-p, just as they normally are in other modes.
The commands for motion by months and years work like those for
weeks, but move a larger distance. The month commands M-}
(calendar-forward-month) and M-{
(calendar-backward-month) move forward or backward by an entire
month. The year commands C-x ]
(calendar-forward-year) and C-x [
(calendar-backward-year) move forward or backward a whole year.
The easiest way to remember these commands is to consider months and years analogous to paragraphs and pages of text, respectively. But the calendar movement commands themselves do not quite parallel those for movement through text: the ordinary Emacs paragraph commands move to the beginning or end of a paragraph, whereas these month and year commands move by an entire month or an entire year, keeping the same date within the month or year.
You can also use the simpler to type keystrokes } and { to navigate by month, and ] and [ to navigate by year.
All these commands accept a numeric argument as a repeat count. For convenience, the digit keys and the minus sign specify numeric arguments in Calendar mode even without the Meta modifier. For example, 100 C-f moves point 100 days forward from its present location.
A week (or month, or year) is not just a quantity of days; we think of weeks (months, years) as starting on particular dates. So Calendar mode provides commands to move to the start or end of a week, month or year:
Move point to end of year (calendar-end-of-year).
These commands also take numeric arguments as repeat counts, with the repeat count indicating how many weeks, months, or years to move backward or forward.
By default, weeks begin on Sunday. To make them begin on Monday
instead, set the variable calendar-week-start-day to 1. To
change which day headers are highlighted as weekend days, set the
variable calendar-weekend-days.
Calendar mode provides commands for moving to a particular date specified in various ways.
Move point to specified date (calendar-goto-date).
Move point to specified day of year (calendar-goto-day-of-year).
Move point to specified week of year (calendar-iso-goto-week).
Center calendar around specified month (calendar-other-month).
Move point to today’s date (calendar-goto-today).
g d (calendar-goto-date) prompts for a year, a month, and a day
of the month, and then moves to that date. Because the calendar includes all
dates from the beginning of the current era, you must type the year in its
entirety; that is, type ‘2010’, not ‘10’.
g D (calendar-goto-day-of-year) prompts for a year and
day number, and moves to that date. Negative day numbers count
backward from the end of the year. g w
(calendar-iso-goto-week) prompts for a year and week number,
and moves to that week.
o (calendar-other-month) prompts for a month and year,
then centers the three-month calendar around that month.
You can return to today’s date with .
(calendar-goto-today).
The calendar display scrolls automatically through time when you move out of the visible portion. You can also scroll it manually. Imagine that the calendar window contains a long strip of paper with the months on it. Scrolling the calendar means moving the strip horizontally, so that new months become visible in the window.
Scroll calendar one month forward (calendar-scroll-left).
Scroll calendar one month backward (calendar-scroll-right).
Scroll the calendar forward (calendar-scroll-calendar-left).
Scroll the calendar backward (calendar-scroll-calendar-right).
Recenter the date at point.
The most basic calendar scroll commands scroll by one month at a time.
> (calendar-scroll-left) scrolls the calendar contents one
month forward in time. < (calendar-scroll-right) scrolls
the contents one month backwards in time.
The commands C-v (calendar-scroll-calendar-left) and
M-v (calendar-scroll-calendar-right) scroll the
calendar by an entire screen—in analogy with the usual meaning of
these commands. C-v makes later dates visible and M-v makes
earlier dates visible. These commands take a numeric argument as a
repeat count.
The function keys PageDown (or next) and PageUp (or prior) are equivalent to C-v and M-v, just as they are in other modes.
The command C-l (calendar-recenter) scrolls the calendar
on display so that the month of the date at point is centered
horizontally. Next invocation of this command puts that month on the
leftmost position, and another invocation puts it on the rightmost
position. Subsequent invocations reuse the same order in a cyclical
manner.
Display the number of days in the current region
(calendar-count-days-region).
To determine the number of days in a range, set the mark on one
date using C-SPC, move point to another date, and type M-=
(calendar-count-days-region). The numbers of days shown is
inclusive; that is, it includes the days specified by mark and
point.
Display day-in-year (calendar-print-day-of-year).
Regenerate the calendar window (calendar-redraw).
Scroll the next window up (scroll-other-window).
Scroll the next window down (scroll-other-window-down).
Exit from calendar (calendar-exit).
Display more months.
Display fewer months.
To display the number of days elapsed since the start of the year, or
the number of days remaining in the year, type the p d command
(calendar-print-day-of-year). This displays both of those
numbers in the echo area. The count of days elapsed includes the
selected date. The count of days remaining does not include that
date.
If the calendar window text gets corrupted, type C-c C-l
(calendar-redraw) to redraw it. (This can only happen if you use
non-Calendar-mode editing commands.)
In Calendar mode, you can use SPC (scroll-other-window)
and DEL (scroll-other-window-down) to scroll the other
window (if there is one) up or down, respectively. This is handy when
you display a list of holidays or diary entries in another window.
To exit from the calendar, type q (calendar-exit). This
buries all buffers related to the calendar, selecting other buffers.
(If a frame contains a dedicated calendar window, exiting from the
calendar deletes or iconifies that frame depending on the value of
calendar-remove-frame-by-deleting.)
The command M-x calendar-show-more-months displays more months on the right side of the calendar. The calendar can show at most 12 months as long as there is enough space. The command M-x calendar-show-fewer-months displays fewer months. The calendar always shows at least 3 months.
You can write calendars and diary entries to HTML and LaTeX files.
The Calendar HTML commands produce files of HTML code that contain
calendar, holiday, and diary entries. Each file applies to one month,
and has a name of the format yyyy-mm.html, where
yyyy and mm are the four-digit year and two-digit month,
respectively. The variable cal-html-directory specifies the
default output directory for the HTML files. To prevent holidays
from being shown, customize cal-html-holidays.
Diary entries enclosed by < and > are interpreted as
HTML tags (for example: this is a diary entry with <font
color=”red”>some red text</font>). You can change the overall
appearance of the displayed HTML pages (for example, the color of
various page elements, header styles) via a stylesheet cal.css in
the directory containing the HTML files (see the value of the variable
cal-html-css-default for relevant style settings).
Generate a one-month calendar (cal-html-cursor-month).
Generate a calendar file for each month of a year, as well as an index
page (cal-html-cursor-year). By default, this command writes
files to a year subdirectory, where year is the year at
cursor—if this is altered, some hyperlinks between years will not
work.
If the variable cal-html-print-day-number-flag is
non-nil, then the monthly calendars show the day-of-the-year
number. The variable cal-html-year-index-cols specifies the
number of columns in the yearly index page.
The Calendar LaTeX commands produce a buffer of LaTeX code that prints as a calendar. Depending on the command you use, the printed calendar covers the day, week, month or year that point is in.
Generate a one-month calendar (cal-tex-cursor-month).
Generate a sideways-printing one-month calendar
(cal-tex-cursor-month-landscape).
Generate a one-day calendar
(cal-tex-cursor-day).
Generate a one-page calendar for one week, with hours
(cal-tex-cursor-week).
Generate a two-page calendar for one week, with hours
(cal-tex-cursor-week2).
Generate an ISO-style calendar for one week, without hours
(cal-tex-cursor-week-iso).
Generate a calendar for one Monday-starting week, with hours
(cal-tex-cursor-week-monday).
Generate a two-page calendar for one week, without hours
(cal-tex-cursor-week2-summary).
Generate a Filofax-style two-weeks-at-a-glance calendar
(cal-tex-cursor-filofax-2week).
Generate a Filofax-style one-week-at-a-glance calendar
(cal-tex-cursor-filofax-week).
Generate a calendar for one year
(cal-tex-cursor-year).
Generate a sideways-printing calendar for one year
(cal-tex-cursor-year-landscape).
Generate a Filofax-style calendar for one year
(cal-tex-cursor-filofax-year).
Some of these commands print the calendar sideways (in landscape mode), so it can be wider than it is long. Some of them use Filofax paper size (3.75in x 6.75in). All of these commands accept a prefix argument, which specifies how many days, weeks, months or years to print (starting always with the selected one).
If the variable cal-tex-holidays is non-nil (the default),
then the printed calendars show the holidays in calendar-holidays.
If the variable cal-tex-diary is non-nil (the default is
nil), diary entries are included also (in monthly, Filofax, and
iso-week calendars only). If the variable cal-tex-rules is
non-nil (the default is nil), the calendar displays ruled
pages in styles that have sufficient room. Consult the documentation of
the individual cal-tex functions to see which calendars support which
features.
You can use the variable cal-tex-preamble-extra to insert extra
LaTeX commands in the preamble of the generated document if you need
to.
The Emacs calendar knows about many major and minor holidays, and can display them. You can add your own holidays to the default list.
Display holidays for the selected date
(calendar-cursor-holidays).
Mark holidays in the calendar window (calendar-mark-holidays).
Unmark calendar window (calendar-unmark).
List all holidays for the displayed months in another window
(calendar-list-holidays).
List all holidays for three months around today’s date in another window.
List holidays in another window for a specified range of years.
To see if any holidays fall on a given date, position point on that
date in the calendar window and use the h
(calendar-cursor-holidays) command. Alternatively, click on
that date with mouse-3 and then choose Holidays from the
menu that appears. Either way, this displays the holidays for that
date, in the echo area if they fit there, otherwise in a separate
window.
To view the distribution of holidays for all the dates shown in the
calendar, use the x (calendar-mark-holidays) command.
This displays the dates that are holidays in a different face.
See calendar-holiday-marker.
The command applies both to the currently visible months and to
other months that subsequently become visible by scrolling. To turn
marking off and erase the current marks, type u
(calendar-unmark), which also erases any diary marks
(see The Diary). If the variable calendar-mark-holidays-flag
is non-nil, creating or updating the calendar marks holidays
automatically.
To get even more detailed information, use the a
(calendar-list-holidays) command, which displays a separate
buffer containing a list of all holidays in the current calendar
range. You can use SPC and DEL in the calendar window to
scroll that list up and down, respectively.
The command M-x holidays displays the list of holidays for the
current month and the preceding and succeeding months; this works even
if you don’t have a calendar window. If the variable
calendar-view-holidays-initially-flag is non-nil, creating
the calendar displays holidays in this way. If you want the list of
holidays centered around a different month, use C-u M-x
holidays, which prompts for the month and year.
The holidays known to Emacs include United States holidays and the major Bahá’í, Chinese, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish holidays; also the solstices and equinoxes.
The command M-x holiday-list displays the list of holidays for a range of years. This function asks you for the starting and stopping years, and allows you to choose all the holidays or one of several categories of holidays. You can use this command even if you don’t have a calendar window.
The dates used by Emacs for holidays are based on current practice, not historical fact. For example Veteran’s Day began in 1919, but is shown in earlier years.
Special calendar commands can tell you, to within a minute or two, the times of sunrise and sunset for any date.
Display times of sunrise and sunset for the selected date
(calendar-sunrise-sunset).
Display times of sunrise and sunset for today’s date.
Display times of sunrise and sunset for a specified date.
Display times of sunrise and sunset for the selected month.
Within the calendar, to display the local times of sunrise
and sunset in the echo area, move point to the date you want, and type
S (calendar-sunrise-sunset). Alternatively, click
mouse-3 on the date, then choose ‘Sunrise/sunset’ from the
menu that appears. The command M-x sunrise-sunset is available
outside the calendar to display this information for today’s date or a
specified date. To specify a date other than today, use C-u M-x
sunrise-sunset, which prompts for the year, month, and day.
You can display the times of sunrise and sunset for any location and any date with C-u C-u M-x sunrise-sunset. This asks you for a longitude, latitude, number of minutes difference from Coordinated Universal Time, and date, and then tells you the times of sunrise and sunset for that location on that date.
Because the times of sunrise and sunset depend on the location on earth, you need to tell Emacs your latitude, longitude, and location name before using these commands. Here is an example of what to set:
(setq calendar-latitude 40.1) (setq calendar-longitude -88.2) (setq calendar-location-name "Urbana, IL")
Use one decimal place in the values of calendar-latitude and
calendar-longitude.
Your time zone also affects the local time of sunrise and sunset. Emacs usually gets time zone information from the operating system, but if these values are not what you want (or if the operating system does not supply them), you must set them yourself. Here is an example:
(setq calendar-time-zone -360) (setq calendar-standard-time-zone-name "CST") (setq calendar-daylight-time-zone-name "CDT")
The value of calendar-time-zone is the number of minutes of
difference between your local standard time and Coordinated Universal
Time (a.k.a. “Greenwich time”). The values of
calendar-standard-time-zone-name and
calendar-daylight-time-zone-name are the abbreviations used in
your time zone. Emacs displays the times of sunrise and sunset
corrected for daylight saving time. See Daylight Saving Time,
for how daylight saving time is determined.
If you want to display numerical time zones (like ‘"+0100"’)
instead of symbolic ones (like ‘"CET"’), set the variable
calendar-time-zone-style to numeric.
As a user, you might find it convenient to set the calendar location variables for your usual physical location in your .emacs file. If you are a system administrator, you may want to set these variables for all users in a default.el file. See The Emacs Initialization File.
The calendar commands described in this section display the dates and times of the phases of the moon (new moon, first quarter, full moon, last quarter). This feature is useful for debugging problems that depend on the phase of the moon.
Display the dates and times for all the quarters of the moon for the
visible period shown (calendar-lunar-phases).
Display dates and times of the quarters of the moon for three months around today’s date.
Within the calendar, use the M (calendar-lunar-phases)
command to display a separate buffer of the phases of the moon for the
current visible range. The dates and times listed are accurate to
within a few minutes.
Outside the calendar, use the command M-x lunar-phases to display the list of the phases of the moon for the current month and the preceding and succeeding months. For information about a different month, use C-u M-x lunar-phases, which prompts for the month and year.
The dates and times given for the phases of the moon are given in local time (corrected for daylight saving, when appropriate). See the discussion in the previous section (see Times of Sunrise and Sunset).
The Emacs calendar displayed is always the Gregorian calendar, sometimes called the New Style calendar, which is used in most of the world today. However, this calendar did not exist before the sixteenth century and was not widely used before the eighteenth century; it did not fully displace the Julian calendar and gain universal acceptance until the early twentieth century. The Emacs calendar can display any month since January, year 1 of the current era, but the calendar displayed is always the Gregorian, even for a date at which the Gregorian calendar did not exist.
While Emacs cannot display other calendars, it can convert dates to and from several other calendars.
The ISO commercial calendar is often used in business.
The Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar, was the one used in Europe throughout medieval times, and in many countries up until the nineteenth century.
Astronomers use a simple counting of days elapsed since noon, Monday, January 1, 4713 BC on the Julian calendar. The number of days elapsed since then is called the Julian day number or the Astronomical day number.
The Hebrew calendar is used by tradition in the Jewish religion. The Emacs calendar program uses the Hebrew calendar to determine the dates of Jewish holidays. Hebrew calendar dates begin and end at sunset.
The Islamic calendar is used in many predominantly Islamic countries. Emacs uses it to determine the dates of Islamic holidays. There is no universal agreement in the Islamic world about the calendar; Emacs uses a widely accepted version, but the precise dates of Islamic holidays often depend on proclamation by religious authorities, not on calculations. As a consequence, the actual dates of observance can vary slightly from the dates computed by Emacs. Islamic calendar dates begin and end at sunset.
The French Revolutionary calendar was created by the Jacobins after the 1789 revolution, to represent a more secular and nature-based view of the annual cycle, and to install a 10-day week in a rationalization measure similar to the metric system. The French government officially abandoned this calendar at the end of 1805.
The Maya of Central America used three separate, overlapping calendar systems, the long count, the tzolkin, and the haab. Emacs knows about all three of these calendars. Experts dispute the exact correlation between the Mayan calendar and our calendar; Emacs uses the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation in its calculations.
The Copts use a calendar based on the ancient Egyptian solar calendar. Their calendar consists of twelve 30-day months followed by an extra five-day period. Once every fourth year they add a leap day to this extra period to make it six days. The Ethiopic calendar is identical in structure, but has different year numbers and month names.
The Persians use a solar calendar based on a design of Omar Khayyam. Their calendar consists of twelve months of which the first six have 31 days, the next five have 30 days, and the last has 29 in ordinary years and 30 in leap years. Leap years occur in a complicated pattern every four or five years. The calendar implemented here is the arithmetical Persian calendar championed by Birashk, based on a 2,820-year cycle. It differs from the astronomical Persian calendar, which is based on astronomical events. As of this writing the first future discrepancy is projected to occur on March 20, 2025. It is currently not clear what the official calendar of Iran will be at that time.
The Chinese calendar is a complicated system of lunar months arranged into solar years. The years go in cycles of sixty, each year containing either twelve months in an ordinary year or thirteen months in a leap year; each month has either 29 or 30 days. Years, ordinary months, and days are named by combining one of ten celestial stems with one of twelve terrestrial branches for a total of sixty names that are repeated in a cycle of sixty.
The Bahá’í calendar system is based on a solar cycle of 19 months with 19 days each. The remaining intercalary days (known as Ayyám-i-Há) are placed between the 18th and 19th months. Following a 2014 calendar reform by the Universal House of Justice, the date of Naw-Rúz (New Year) is now determined by the vernal equinox as observed from Tehran, and the dates of the Twin Holy Birthdays (Birth of the Báb and Birth of Bahá’u’lláh) are calculated from the eighth new moon after Naw-Rúz. For dates before 172 BE (2015 CE), the calendar follows the pre-reform fixed calculations.
The following commands describe the selected date (the date at point) in various other calendar systems:
Display the selected date in various other calendars.
(calendar-print-other-dates).
Display ISO commercial calendar equivalent for selected day
(calendar-iso-print-date).
Display Julian date for selected day (calendar-julian-print-date).
Display astronomical (Julian) day number for selected day
(calendar-astro-print-day-number).
Display Hebrew date for selected day (calendar-hebrew-print-date).
Display Islamic date for selected day (calendar-islamic-print-date).
Display French Revolutionary date for selected day
(calendar-french-print-date).
Display Bahá’í date for selected day
(calendar-bahai-print-date).
Display Chinese date for selected day
(calendar-chinese-print-date).
Display Coptic date for selected day
(calendar-coptic-print-date).
Display Ethiopic date for selected day
(calendar-ethiopic-print-date).
Display Persian date for selected day
(calendar-persian-print-date).
Display Mayan date for selected day (calendar-mayan-print-date).
Otherwise, move point to the date you want to convert, then type the
appropriate command starting with p from the table above. The
prefix p is a mnemonic for “print”, since Emacs “prints” the
equivalent date in the echo area. p o
(calendar-print-other-dates) displays the date in all forms
known to Emacs. You can also use mouse-3 and then choose
Other calendars from the menu that appears. This displays the
equivalent forms of the date in all the calendars Emacs understands,
in the form of a menu. (Choosing an alternative from this menu
doesn’t actually do anything—the menu is used only for display.)
You can use the other supported calendars to specify a date to move to. This section describes the commands for doing this using calendars other than Mayan; for the Mayan calendar, see the following section.
Move to a date specified in the ISO commercial calendar
(calendar-iso-goto-date).
Move to a week specified in the ISO commercial calendar
(calendar-iso-goto-week).
Move to a date specified in the Julian calendar
(calendar-julian-goto-date).
Move to a date specified with an astronomical (Julian) day number
(calendar-astro-goto-day-number).
Move to a date specified in the Bahá’í calendar
(calendar-bahai-goto-date).
Move to a date specified in the Hebrew calendar
(calendar-hebrew-goto-date).
Move to a date specified in the Islamic calendar
(calendar-islamic-goto-date).
Move to a date specified in the French Revolutionary calendar
(calendar-french-goto-date).
Move to a date specified in the Chinese calendar
(calendar-chinese-goto-date).
Move to a date specified in the Persian calendar
(calendar-persian-goto-date).
Move to a date specified in the Coptic calendar
(calendar-coptic-goto-date).
Move to a date specified in the Ethiopic calendar
(calendar-ethiopic-goto-date).
These commands ask you for a date on the other calendar, move point to the Gregorian calendar date equivalent to that date, and display the other calendar’s date in the echo area. Emacs uses strict completion (see Completion Exit) whenever it asks you to type a month name, so you don’t have to worry about the spelling of Hebrew, Islamic, or French names.
One common issue concerning the Hebrew calendar is the computation of the anniversary of a date of death, called a yahrzeit. The Emacs calendar includes a facility for such calculations. If you are in the calendar, the command M-x calendar-hebrew-list-yahrzeits asks you for a range of years and then displays a list of the yahrzeit dates for those years for the date given by point. If you are not in the calendar, this command first asks you for the date of death and the range of years, and then displays the list of yahrzeit dates.
The Emacs diary keeps track of appointments or other events on a daily basis, in conjunction with the calendar. To use the diary feature, you must first create a diary file containing a list of events and their dates. Then Emacs can automatically pick out and display the events for today, for the immediate future, or for any specified date.
Although you probably will start by creating a diary manually, Emacs provides a number of commands to let you view, add, and change diary entries.
Your diary file is a file that records events associated with
particular dates. The name of the diary file is specified by the
variable diary-file. The default is ~/.emacs.d/diary,
though for compatibility with older versions Emacs will use
~/diary if it exists.
Each entry in the diary file describes one event and consists of one or more lines. An entry always begins with a date specification at the left margin. The rest of the entry is simply text to describe the event. If the entry has more than one line, then the lines after the first must begin with whitespace to indicate they continue a previous entry. Lines that do not begin with valid dates and do not continue a preceding entry are ignored. Here’s an example:
12/22/2015 Twentieth wedding anniversary!
10/22 Ruth's birthday.
* 21, *: Payday
Tuesday--weekly meeting with grad students at 10am
Supowit, Shen, Bitner, and Kapoor to attend.
1/13/89 Friday the thirteenth!!
thu 4pm squash game with Lloyd.
mar 16 Dad's birthday
April 15, 2016 Income tax due.
* 15 time cards due.
This example uses extra spaces to align the event descriptions of most of the entries. Such formatting is purely a matter of taste.
You can also use a format where the first line of a diary entry consists only of the date or day name (with no following blanks or punctuation). For example:
02/11/2012
Bill B. visits Princeton today
2pm Cognitive Studies Committee meeting
2:30-5:30 Liz at Lawrenceville
4:00pm Dentist appt
7:30pm Dinner at George's
8:00-10:00pm concert
This entry will have a different appearance if you use the simple diary display (see Diary Display). The simple diary display omits the date line at the beginning; only the continuation lines appear. This style of entry looks neater when you display just a single day’s entries, but can cause confusion if you ask for more than one day’s entries.
Once you have created a diary file, you can use the calendar to view it. You can also view today’s events outside of Calendar mode. In the following, key bindings refer to the Calendar buffer.
Display all diary entries for the selected date
(diary-view-entries).
Display the entire diary file (diary-show-all-entries).
Mark all visible dates that have diary entries
(diary-mark-entries).
Unmark the calendar window (calendar-unmark).
Print hard copy of the diary display as it appears.
Display all diary entries for today’s date.
Mail yourself email reminders about upcoming diary entries.
Displaying the diary entries with d
(diary-view-entries) shows in a separate buffer the diary
entries for the selected date in the calendar. The mode line of the
new buffer shows the date of the diary entries. Holidays are shown
either in the buffer or in the mode line, depending on the display
method you choose
(see Diary Display).
If you specify a numeric argument with d, it shows all the diary
entries for that many successive days. Thus, 2 d displays all the
entries for the selected date and for the following day.
Another way to display the diary entries for a date is to click
mouse-3 on the date, and then choose Diary entries from
the menu that appears. If the variable
calendar-view-diary-initially-flag is non-nil, creating the
calendar lists the diary entries for the current date (provided the
current date is visible).
To get a broader view of which days are mentioned in the diary, use
the m (diary-mark-entries) command. This marks the dates
that have diary entries in a different face.
See diary-entry-marker.
This command applies both to the months that are currently visible
and to those that subsequently become visible after scrolling. To
turn marking off and erase the current marks, type u
(calendar-unmark), which also turns off holiday marks
(see Holidays). If the variable
calendar-mark-diary-entries-flag is non-nil, creating or
updating the calendar marks diary dates automatically.
To prevent an individual diary entry from being marked in the
calendar, insert the string that diary-nonmarking-symbol
specifies (the default is ‘&’) at the beginning of the entry,
before the date. This has no effect on display of the entry in the
diary buffer; it only affects marks on dates in the calendar.
Nonmarking entries can be useful for generic entries that would
otherwise mark many different dates.
To see the full diary file, rather than just some of the entries, use
the s (diary-show-all-entries) command.
The command M-x diary displays the diary entries for the current
date, independently of the calendar display, and optionally for the next
few days as well; the variable diary-number-of-entries specifies
how many days to include.
See diary-number-of-entries.
If you put (diary) in your .emacs file, this
automatically displays a window with the day’s diary entries when you
start Emacs.
Some people like to receive email notifications of events in their
diary. To send such mail to yourself, use the command M-x
diary-mail-entries. A prefix argument specifies how many days
(starting with today) to check; otherwise, the variable
diary-mail-days says how many days.
Here are some sample diary entries, illustrating different ways of formatting a date. The examples all show dates in American order (month, day, year), but Calendar mode supports European order (day, month, year) and ISO order (year, month, day) as options.
4/20/12 Switch-over to new tabulation system apr. 25 Start tabulating annual results 4/30 Results for April are due */25 Monthly cycle finishes Friday Don't leave without backing up files
The first entry appears only once, on April 20, 2012. The second and third appear every year on the specified dates, and the fourth uses a wildcard (asterisk) for the month, so it appears on the 25th of every month. The final entry appears every week on Friday.
You can use just numbers to express a date, as in ‘month/day’ or ‘month/day/year’. This must be followed by a nondigit. In the date itself, month and day are numbers of one or two digits. The optional year is also a number, and may be abbreviated to the last two digits; that is, you can use ‘11/12/2012’ or ‘11/12/12’.
Dates can also have the form ‘monthname day’ or
‘monthname day, year’, where the month’s name can
be spelled in full or abbreviated (with or without a period). The
preferred abbreviations for month and day names can be set using
the variables calendar-abbrev-length,
calendar-month-abbrev-array, and
calendar-day-abbrev-array. The default is to use the first three
letters of a name as its abbreviation. Case is not significant.
A date may be generic; that is, partially unspecified. Then the entry applies to all dates that match the specification. If the date does not contain a year, it is generic and applies to any year. Alternatively, month, day, or year can be ‘*’; this matches any month, day, or year, respectively. Thus, a diary entry ‘3/*/*’ matches any day in March of any year; so does ‘march *’.
If you prefer the European style of writing dates (in which the day
comes before the month), or the ISO style (in which the order is year,
month, day), type M-x calendar-set-date-style while in the
calendar, or customize the variable calendar-date-style. This
affects how diary dates are interpreted, date display, and the order in
which some commands expect their arguments to be given.
You can use the name of a day of the week as a generic date which applies to any date falling on that day of the week. You can abbreviate the day of the week as described above, or spell it in full; case is not significant.
While in the calendar, there are several commands to create diary entries. The basic commands are listed here; more sophisticated commands are in the next section (see Special Diary Entries). Entries can also be based on non-Gregorian calendars. See Diary Entries Using non-Gregorian Calendars.
Add a diary entry for the selected date (diary-insert-entry).
Add a diary entry for the selected day of the week (diary-insert-weekly-entry).
Add a diary entry for the selected day of the month (diary-insert-monthly-entry).
Add a diary entry for the selected day of the year (diary-insert-yearly-entry).
You can make a diary entry for a specific date by selecting that
date in the calendar window and typing the i d
(diary-insert-entry) command. This command displays the end of
your diary file in another window and inserts the date; you can then
type the rest of the diary entry.
If you want to make a diary entry that applies to a specific day of
the week, select that day of the week (any occurrence will do) and
type i w (diary-insert-weekly-entry). This inserts the
day-of-week as a generic date; you can then type the rest of the diary
entry. You can make a monthly diary entry in the same fashion: select
the day of the month, use the i m
(diary-insert-monthly-entry) command, and type the rest of the
entry. Similarly, you can insert a yearly diary entry with the i
y (diary-insert-yearly-entry) command.
All of the above commands make marking diary entries by default. To make a nonmarking diary entry, give a prefix argument to the command. For example, C-u i w makes a nonmarking weekly diary entry.
When you modify the diary file, be sure to save the file before
exiting Emacs. Saving the diary file after using any of the above
insertion commands will automatically update the diary marks in the
calendar window, if appropriate. You can use the command
calendar-redraw to force an update at any time.
In addition to entries based on calendar dates, the diary file can contain sexp entries for regular events such as anniversaries. These entries are based on Lisp expressions (sexps) that Emacs evaluates as it scans the diary file. Instead of a date, a sexp entry contains ‘%%’ followed by a Lisp expression which must begin and end with parentheses. The Lisp expression determines which dates the entry applies to.
Calendar mode provides commands to insert certain commonly used sexp entries:
Add an anniversary diary entry for the selected date
(diary-insert-anniversary-entry).
Add a block diary entry for the current region
(diary-insert-block-entry).
Add a cyclic diary entry starting at the date
(diary-insert-cyclic-entry).
If you want to make a diary entry that applies to the anniversary of
a specific date, move point to that date and use the i a
(diary-insert-anniversary-entry) command. This displays the
end of your diary file in another window and inserts the anniversary
description; you can then type the rest of the diary entry. The entry
looks like this:
%%(diary-anniversary 10 31 1988) Arthur's birthday
This entry applies to October 31 in any year after 1988; ‘10 31 1988’ specifies the date. (If you are using the European or ISO calendar style, the input order of month, day and year is different.) The reason this expression requires a beginning year is that advanced diary functions can use it to calculate the number of elapsed years.
A block diary entry applies to a specified range of consecutive dates. Here is a block diary entry that applies to all dates from June 24, 2012 through July 10, 2012:
%%(diary-block 6 24 2012 7 10 2012) Vacation
The ‘6 24 2012’ indicates the starting date and the ‘7 10 2012’ indicates the stopping date. (Again, if you are using the European or ISO calendar style, the input order of month, day and year is different.)
To insert a block entry, place point and the mark on the two dates
that begin and end the range, and type i b
(diary-insert-block-entry). This command displays the end of
your diary file in another window and inserts the block description;
you can then type the diary entry.
Cyclic diary entries repeat after a fixed interval of days.
To create one, select the starting date and use the i c
(diary-insert-cyclic-entry) command. The command prompts for
the length of interval, then inserts the entry, which looks like this:
%%(diary-cyclic 50 3 1 2012) Renew medication
This entry applies to March 1, 2012 and every 50th day following; ‘3 1 2012’ specifies the starting date. (If you are using the European or ISO calendar style, the input order of month, day and year is different.)
All three of these commands make marking diary entries. To insert a nonmarking entry, give a prefix argument to the command. For example, C-u i a makes a nonmarking anniversary diary entry.
Marking sexp diary entries in the calendar can be time-consuming, since every date visible in the calendar window must be individually checked. So it’s a good idea to make sexp diary entries nonmarking (with ‘&’) when possible.
Another sophisticated kind of sexp entry, a floating diary entry,
specifies a regularly occurring event by offsets specified in days,
weeks, and months. It is comparable to a crontab entry interpreted by
the cron utility. Here is a nonmarking, floating diary entry
that applies to the fourth Thursday in November:
&%%(diary-float 11 4 4) American Thanksgiving
The 11 specifies November (the eleventh month), the 4 specifies Thursday
(the fourth day of the week, where Sunday is numbered zero), and the
second 4 specifies the fourth Thursday (1 would mean “first”, 2 would
mean “second”, −2 would mean “second-to-last”, and so on).
The month can be a single month or a list of months. Thus you could change
the 11 above to ‘'(1 2 3)’ and have the entry apply to the last
Thursday of January, February, and March. If the month is t, the
entry applies to all months of the year.
%%(diary-offset '(diary-float t 3 4) 2) Monthly committee meeting
This entry applies to the Saturday after the third Thursday of each
month. The 2 specifies number of days after when the sexp
'(diary-float t 3 4) would evaluate to t. This is
useful when for example your organization has a committee meeting two
days after every monthly meeting which takes place on the third
Thursday, or if you would like to attend a virtual meeting scheduled
in a different timezone causing a difference in the date.
Each of the standard sexp diary entries takes an optional parameter specifying the name of a face or a single-character string to use when marking the entry in the calendar. Most generally, sexp diary entries can perform arbitrary computations to determine when they apply. See Sexp Entries and the Fancy Diary Display.
If you have a diary entry for an appointment, and that diary entry
begins with a recognizable time of day, Emacs can warn you in advance
that an appointment is pending. Emacs alerts you
to the appointment by displaying a message in your chosen format, as
specified by the variable appt-display-format. If the value of
appt-audible is non-nil, the warning includes an audible
reminder. In addition, if appt-display-mode-line is
non-nil, Emacs displays the number of minutes to the
appointment on the mode line.
If appt-display-format has the value window, then the
variable appt-display-duration controls how long the reminder
window is visible for; and the variables
appt-disp-window-function and appt-delete-window-function
give the names of functions used to create and destroy the window,
respectively.
To enable appointment notification, type M-x appt-activate. With a positive argument, it enables notification; with a negative argument, it disables notification; with no argument, it toggles. Enabling notification also sets up an appointment list for today from the diary file, giving all diary entries found with recognizable times of day, and reminds you just before each of them.
For example, suppose the diary file contains these lines:
Monday 9:30am Coffee break 12:00pm Lunch
Then on Mondays, you will be reminded at around 9:20am about your
coffee break and at around 11:50am about lunch. The variable
appt-message-warning-time specifies how many minutes (default 12)
in advance to warn you. This is a default warning time. Each
appointment can specify a different warning time by adding a piece
matching appt-warning-time-regexp (see that variable’s
documentation for details).
You can write times in am/pm style (with ‘12:00am’ standing for midnight and ‘12:00pm’ standing for noon), or 24-hour European/military style. You need not be consistent; your diary file can have a mixture of the two styles. Times must be at the beginning of diary entries if they are to be recognized.
Emacs updates the appointments list from the diary file
automatically just after midnight. You can force an update at any
time by re-enabling appointment notification. Both these actions also
display the day’s diary buffer, unless you set
appt-display-diary to nil. The appointments list is
also updated whenever the diary file (or a file it includes; see
Fancy Diary Display)
is saved. If you use the Org Mode and keep appointments in your Org
agenda files, you can add those appointments to the list using the
org-agenda-to-appt command. See Appointment reminders in The Org Manual, for more about that
command.
You can also use the appointment notification facility like an alarm clock. The command M-x appt-add adds entries to the appointment list without affecting your diary file. You delete entries from the appointment list with M-x appt-delete.
You can transfer diary entries between Emacs diary files and other formats.
iCalendar is an Internet standard format for exchanging calendar data. Many calendar applications can export and import data in iCalendar format. iCalendar data is also often sent as email attachments. iCalendar data usually uses the .ics file extension, and is sent with the ‘text/calendar’ MIME type in email. (See Mail Miscellany, for more information on MIME and email attachments.)
The diary-icalendar package allows you to make use of iCalendar
data with the Emacs diary. You can import and export data between
iCalendar format and your Emacs diary file, and also display iCalendar
data directly in the diary.
The following commands will import iCalendar data to your diary file:
diary-icalendar-import-file ¶Imports an iCalendar file to an Emacs diary file.
diary-icalendar-import-buffer ¶Imports iCalendar data from the current buffer to an Emacs diary file.
diary-icalendar-import-buffer is also suitable for importing
iCalendar data from email attachments. For example, with the Rmail mail
client, you could use:
(add-hook 'rmail-show-message-hook #'diary-icalendar-import-buffer)
Diary import depends on a number of user-customizable variables, which
are in the diary-icalendar-import customization group. You can
review and customize these variables with M-x customize-group.
See Customization Groups.
iCalendar data is grouped into components which represent calendar events (the VEVENT component), tasks (VTODO), and other text data (VJOURNAL). Because these components contain different types of data, they are imported by different functions, determined by the following variables:
diary-icalendar-vevent-format-function ¶Function to format VEVENT components for the diary.
diary-icalendar-vjournal-format-function ¶Function to format VJOURNAL components for the diary.
diary-icalendar-vtodo-format-function ¶Function to format VTODO components for the diary.
You can customize the format of the imported diary entries by writing your own formatting functions. It is convenient (but not required) to express such functions as templates called skeletons.
For example, suppose you only want to import the date, time, summary, and location of each calendar event, and to write them on a single line like:
2025/11/11 Summary @ Some Location
Then you could write the import formatting function as a skeleton and
set it to the value of diary-icalendar-vevent-format-function as
follows:
(require 'skeleton)
(defun simple-vevent (_)
"Format a VEVENT summary and location on a single line"
(skeleton-insert
'(nil
ical-start-to-end & " " & ical-summary & " "
(when ical-location "@ ") & ical-location "\n")))
(setopt diary-icalendar-vevent-format-function #'simple-vevent)
The variables ical-start-to-end, ical-summary and
ical-location in this example are dynamically bound to
appropriate values when the skeleton is called. See the docstring of
diary-icalendar-vevent-format-function for more information.
Any errors encountered during import will be reported in a buffer named
*icalendar-errors*. You can review these errors with the
next-error command. See Compilation Mode. If you regularly
need to import malformed iCalendar data, there are several hooks
available for this purpose; see the icalendar-parser
customization group.
If you primarily store your calendar data outside of Emacs, but still want to see it in the Emacs calendar and diary, you can do so by including an iCalendar file from your diary file.
Suppose, for example, that you download your calendar from an external server to a file called Appointments.ics. Then you can include this file in your diary by writing a line like
#include "path/to/Appointments.ics"
in your diary file. You must also set up some hooks to display the data in that file as diary entries and mark them in the calendar:
(add-hook 'diary-mark-entries-hook
#'diary-mark-included-diary-files)
(add-hook 'diary-nongregorian-marking-hook
#'diary-icalendar-mark-entries)
(add-hook 'diary-list-entries-hook
#'diary-include-other-diary-files)
(add-hook 'diary-nongregorian-listing-hook
#'diary-icalendar-display-entries)
Events, tasks, and journal entries in Appointments.ics will then show up on the appropriate days when you display the diary from the calendar. See Displaying the Diary.
The advantage of doing this is that you don’t need to synchronize the data between the calendar server and your diary file. This is simpler and more reliable than regularly importing and exporting between diary and iCalendar format.
You can also display iCalendar attachments in email messages
without importing them to your diary file using the function
diary-icalendar-mailcap-viewer. You can add this function, for
example, to the variable mailcap-user-mime-data; see its docstring
for more information.
Displaying iCalendar entries uses the same infrastructure as importing them, so customizing the import format will also change the format of the displayed entries. See Importing iCalendar data as Diary Entries.
The following commands will export diary entries in iCalendar format:
diary-icalendar-export-file ¶Exports a diary file to iCalendar format.
diary-icalendar-export-region ¶Exports a region of diary text to iCalendar format.
iCalendar export depends on a number of user-customizable variables, which
are in the diary-icalendar-export customization group. You can
review and customize these variables with M-x customize-group.
See Customization Groups.
Exporting diary entries to iCalendar requires you to respect certain conventions in your diary, so that iCalendar properties can be parsed from your diary entries.
By default, the exporter will use the first line of the entry (after the date and time) as the iCalendar summary and the rest of the entry as its iCalendar description. Other iCalendar properties can also be encoded in the entry on separate lines, like this:
2025/11/11 Bender's birthday bash
Location: Robot House
Attendees:
Fry <philip.fry@mars.edu>
Günter <guenter@mars.edu>
This format matches the format produced by the default import functions.
If you customize the import format, or you want to export diary entries
in a different format, you will need to customize the export variables
to detect the format of your diary entries. The most common iCalendar
properties are parsed from diary entries using regular expressions. See
the variables named diary-icalendar-*-regexp in the
diary-icalendar-export customization group to modify how these
properties are parsed.
If you need to export other iCalendar properties, or do more
complicated parsing, you can define a function to do so and set it as
the value of the variable diary-icalendar-other-properties-parser;
see its docstring for details.
By default, the exporter assumes that each diary entry represents a
single iCalendar event. If you like to keep your diary in a
one-entry-per-day format, with different events on continuation
lines within the same entry, you can still export such entries as
distinct iCalendar events. To do this, set the variable
diary-icalendar-export-linewise to a non-nil value.
For example, after setting this variable, an entry like:
2025-05-03
9AM Lab meeting
Günter to present on new assay
Start experiment A
12:30-1:30PM Lunch with Phil
16:00 Experiment A finishes; move to freezer
will be exported as four events, each on the same day, but with
different start times (except for the second event, “Start experiment
A”, which has no start time). See the docstring of
diary-icalendar-export-linewise for more information.
You can also import diary entries from Outlook-generated appointment
messages. While viewing such a message in Rmail or Gnus, do M-x
diary-from-outlook to import the entry. You can make this command
recognize additional appointment message formats by customizing the
variable diary-outlook-formats. Other mail clients can set
diary-from-outlook-function to an appropriate value.
Emacs understands the difference between standard time and daylight saving time—the times given for sunrise, sunset, solstices, equinoxes, and the phases of the moon take that into account. The rules for daylight saving 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. If the resulting rules are not what you want,
you can tell Emacs the rules to use by setting certain variables:
calendar-daylight-savings-starts and
calendar-daylight-savings-ends.
These values should be Lisp expressions that refer to the variable
year, and evaluate to the Gregorian date on which daylight
saving 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 saving time.
Emacs uses these expressions to determine the starting date of daylight saving 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 2 0 3 year) (calendar-nth-named-day 1 0 11 year)
That is, the second 0th day (Sunday) of the third month (March) in
the year specified by year, and the first Sunday of the eleventh month
(November) of that year. If daylight saving time were
changed to start on October 1, you would set
calendar-daylight-savings-starts to this:
(list 10 1 year)
If there is no daylight saving 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 saving time and standard time, measured in
minutes. The value for Cambridge, Massachusetts is 60.
Finally, the two variables
calendar-daylight-savings-starts-time and
calendar-daylight-savings-ends-time specify the number of
minutes after midnight local time when the transition to and from
daylight saving time should occur. For Cambridge, Massachusetts both
variables’ values are 120.
The timeclock package adds up time intervals, so you can (for instance) keep track of how much time you spend working on particular projects. (A more advanced alternative is to use the Org Mode’s facilities for clocking time, see Clocking Work Time in The Org Manual).
Use the M-x timeclock-in command when you start working on a project, and M-x timeclock-out command when you’re done. Each time you do this, it adds one time interval to the record of the project. You can change to working on a different project with M-x timeclock-change.
Once you’ve collected data from a number of time intervals, you can use M-x timeclock-workday-remaining to see how much time is left to work today (assuming a typical average of 8 hours a day), and M-x timeclock-when-to-leave which will calculate when you’re done.
If you want Emacs to display the amount of time left of your
workday in the mode line, either customize the
timeclock-mode-line-display variable and set its value to
t, or invoke the M-x timeclock-mode-line-display command.
Terminating the current Emacs session might or might not mean that
you have stopped working on the project and, by default, Emacs asks
you. You can, however, customize the value of the variable
timeclock-ask-before-exiting to nil to avoid the question;
then, only an explicit M-x timeclock-out or M-x
timeclock-change will tell Emacs that the current interval is over.
The timeclock functions work by accumulating the data in a file
called ~/.emacs.d/timelog. You can specify a
different name for this file by customizing the variable
timeclock-file. If you edit the timeclock file manually, or if
you change the value of any of timeclock’s customizable variables, you
should run the command M-x timeclock-reread-log to update the
data in Emacs from the file.
This section describes some of the more advanced/specialized features of the calendar and diary. It starts with some of the many ways in which you can customize the calendar and diary to suit your personal tastes.
The calendar display unfortunately cannot be changed from three
months, but you can customize the whitespace used by setting the
variables: calendar-left-margin,
calendar-day-header-width, calendar-day-digit-width,
calendar-column-width, and calendar-intermonth-spacing.
To display text between the months, for example week numbers,
customize the variables calendar-intermonth-header and
calendar-intermonth-text as described in their documentation.
The variable calendar-month-header controls the text that
appears above each month in the calendar. By default, it shows the
month and year. The variable calendar-day-header-array
controls the text that appears above each day’s column in every month.
By default, it shows the first two letters of each day’s name.
The variable calendar-holiday-marker specifies how to mark a
date that is a holiday. Its value may be a single-character string 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 function calendar-mark-today
uses calendar-today-marker to mark today’s date. By default,
the calendar uses faces named holiday, diary, and
calendar-today for these purposes.
Starting the calendar runs the normal hook
calendar-initial-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 calendar-today-visible-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
mark today’s date; to do that use either of the functions
calendar-mark-today or calendar-star-date:
(add-hook 'calendar-today-visible-hook 'calendar-mark-today)
A similar normal hook, calendar-today-invisible-hook is run if
the current date is not visible in the window.
Each of the calendar cursor motion commands runs the hook
calendar-move-hook after it moves the cursor.
There are several variables listing the default holidays that Emacs
knows about. These are: holiday-general-holidays,
holiday-local-holidays, holiday-solar-holidays,
holiday-bahai-holidays, holiday-christian-holidays,
holiday-hebrew-holidays, holiday-islamic-holidays,
holiday-oriental-holidays, and holiday-other-holidays.
The names should be self-explanatory; e.g., holiday-solar-holidays
lists sun- and moon-related holidays.
You can customize these lists of holidays to your own needs, deleting or
adding holidays as described below. Set any of them to nil to
not show the associated holidays.
The general holidays are, by default, holidays common throughout the
United States. In contrast, holiday-local-holidays and
holiday-other-holidays are both empty by default. These are
intended for system-wide settings and your individual use,
respectively.
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 calendar-bahai-all-holidays-flag,
calendar-christian-all-holidays-flag,
calendar-hebrew-all-holidays-flag, or
calendar-islamic-all-holidays-flag to t.
Each of the holiday variables is a list of holiday forms, each 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 argument string is always the description of the holiday, as a string.
(holiday-fixed month day string)A fixed date on the Gregorian calendar.
(holiday-float month dayname k string&optional day) The kth dayname (dayname=0 for Sunday, and so on) after or before Gregorian date month, day. Negative k means count back from the end of the month. Optional day defaults to 1 if k is positive, and the last day of month otherwise.
(holiday-chinese month day string)A fixed date on the Chinese calendar.
(holiday-hebrew month day string)A fixed date on the Hebrew calendar.
(holiday-islamic month day string)A fixed date on the Islamic calendar.
(holiday-julian month day string)A fixed date on the Julian calendar.
(holiday-sexp sexp string)A date calculated by the Lisp expression sexp. The expression
should use the variable year to compute and return the date of a
holiday in the form of a list (month day year),
or nil if the holiday doesn’t happen this year.
(if condition holiday-form)A holiday that happens only if condition is true.
(function [args])A list of dates calculated by the function function, called with arguments args.
For example, suppose you want to add Bastille Day, celebrated in France on July 14 (i.e., the fourteenth day of the seventh month). You can do this as follows:
(setq holiday-other-holidays '((holiday-fixed 7 14 "Bastille Day")))
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 July:
(holiday-float 7 1 4 "Hurricane Supplication Day")
Here the 7 specifies July, 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 Bahá’í, Chinese, Hebrew, Islamic, and Julian calendars too. For example,
(setq holiday-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 (zerop (% 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 (zerop (% displayed-year 4))
(holiday-fixed 11
(calendar-extract-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 holiday-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 4 2012) "Lunar Eclipse") ((11 13 2012) "Solar Eclipse") ... )
Here are the commands to select dates based on the Mayan calendar:
Move to a date specified by the long count calendar
(calendar-mayan-goto-long-count-date).
Move to the next occurrence of a place in the
tzolkin calendar (calendar-mayan-next-tzolkin-date).
Move to the previous occurrence of a place in the
tzolkin calendar (calendar-mayan-previous-tzolkin-date).
Move to the next occurrence of a place in the
haab calendar (calendar-mayan-next-haab-date).
Move to the previous occurrence of a place in the
haab calendar (calendar-mayan-previous-haab-date).
Move to the next occurrence of a place in the
calendar round (calendar-mayan-next-calendar-round-date).
Move to the previous occurrence of a place in the
calendar round (calendar-mayan-previous-calendar-round-date).
To understand these commands, you need to understand the Mayan calendars. The long count is a counting of days with these units:
1 kin = 1 day 1 uinal = 20 kin 1 tun = 18 uinal 1 katun = 20 tun 1 baktun = 20 katun
Thus, the long count date 12.16.11.16.6 means 12 baktun, 16 katun, 11 tun, 16 uinal, and 6 kin. The Emacs calendar can handle Mayan long count dates as early as 7.17.18.13.3, but no earlier. When you use the g m l command, type the Mayan long count date with the baktun, katun, tun, uinal, and kin separated by periods.
The Mayan tzolkin calendar is a cycle of 260 days formed by a pair of independent cycles of 13 and 20 days. Since this cycle repeats endlessly, Emacs provides commands to move backward and forward to the previous or next point in the cycle. Type g m p t to go to the previous tzolkin date; Emacs asks you for a tzolkin date and moves point to the previous occurrence of that date. Similarly, type g m n t to go to the next occurrence of a tzolkin date.
The Mayan haab calendar is a cycle of 365 days arranged as 18 months of 20 days each, followed by a 5-day monthless period. Like the tzolkin cycle, this cycle repeats endlessly, and there are commands to move backward and forward to the previous or next point in the cycle. Type g m p h to go to the previous haab date; Emacs asks you for a haab date and moves point to the previous occurrence of that date. Similarly, type g m n h to go to the next occurrence of a haab date.
The Maya also used the combination of the tzolkin date and the haab date. This combination is a cycle of about 52 years called a calendar round. If you type g m p c, Emacs asks you for both a haab and a tzolkin date and then moves point to the previous occurrence of that combination. Use g m n c to move point to the next occurrence of a combination. These commands signal an error if the haab/tzolkin date combination you have typed is impossible.
Emacs uses strict completion (see Completion Exit) whenever it asks you to type a Mayan name, so you don’t have to worry about spelling.
You can customize the way dates are displayed in the diary, mode
lines, and 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 default ISO date representation is:
((format "%s-%.2d-%.2d" year (string-to-number month)
(string-to-number day)))
Another typical American format is:
(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 is:
(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 ")"))
Note that few calendar functions return a time of day (at present, only solar functions).
Ordinarily, the diary window indicates any holidays that fall on the
date of the diary entries, either in the mode line or the buffer itself.
The process of checking for holidays can be slow, depending on the
defined holidays. In that case, setting diary-show-holidays-flag
to nil will speed up the diary display.
The variable diary-number-of-entries controls the number of
days of diary entries to be displayed at one time. It affects the
initial display when calendar-view-diary-initially-flag is
t, as well as the command M-x diary. For example, a value
of 1 (the default) displays only the current day’s diary entries,
whereas a value of 2 will also show the next day’s entries. The value
can also be a vector of seven integers: 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.
You can customize the form of dates in your diary file 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 Regular Expressions in the Emacs
Lisp Reference Manual) 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
capitalization and abbreviation (as specified by
calendar-month-abbrev-array and
calendar-day-abbrev-array). 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
provided by diary-american-date-forms:
((month "/" day "[^/0-9]") (month "/" day "/" year "[^0-9]") (monthname " *" day "[^,0-9]") (monthname " *" day ", *" year "[^0-9]") (dayname "\\W"))
The variables diary-european-date-forms and
diary-iso-date-forms provide other default styles.
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. For example, the default value of
diary-european-date-forms is:
((day "/" month "[^/0-9]") (day "/" month "/" year "[^0-9]") (backup day " *" monthname "\\W+\\<\\([^*0-9]\\|\\([0-9]+[:aApP]\\)\\)") (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.
As well as entries based on the standard Gregorian calendar, your diary can have entries based on Bahá’í, Chinese, Hebrew, or Islamic dates. Recognition of such entries can be time-consuming, however, and since 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 'diary-nongregorian-listing-hook 'diary-hebrew-list-entries) (add-hook 'diary-nongregorian-marking-hook 'diary-hebrew-mark-entries)
Similarly, for Islamic, Bahá’í and Chinese entries, add
diary-islamic-list-entries and diary-islamic-mark-entries,
diary-bahai-list-entries and diary-bahai-mark-entries,
or diary-chinese-list-entries and diary-chinese-mark-entries.
These diary entries have the same formats as Gregorian-date diary
entries; except that diary-bahai-entry-symbol (default ‘B’)
must precede a Bahá’í date, diary-chinese-entry-symbol (default
‘C’) a Chinese date, diary-hebrew-entry-symbol (default
‘H’) a Hebrew date, and diary-islamic-entry-symbol (default
‘I’) an Islamic date. Moreover, non-Gregorian month names may not
be abbreviated (because the first three letters are often not unique).
(Note also that you must use “Adar I” if you want Adar of a common
Hebrew year.) 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, non-Gregorian entries are
nonmarking if preceded by diary-nonmarking-symbol (default
‘&’).
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 Bahá’í, Chinese, Hebrew, or Islamic calendars:
diary-hebrew-insert-entry
diary-hebrew-insert-monthly-entry
diary-hebrew-insert-yearly-entry
diary-islamic-insert-entry
diary-islamic-insert-monthly-entry
diary-islamic-insert-yearly-entry
diary-bahai-insert-entry
diary-bahai-insert-monthly-entry
diary-bahai-insert-yearly-entry
diary-chinese-insert-entry
diary-chinese-insert-monthly-entry
diary-chinese-insert-yearly-entry
diary-chinese-insert-anniversary-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. The basic commands add an entry for the specific non-Gregorian date, the ‘monthly’ commands for the given non-Gregorian day-within-month in every month, and the ‘yearly’ commands for the given non-Gregorian day and month in every year.
Diary display works by preparing the list of diary entries and then
running the function specified by the variable
diary-display-function. The default value
diary-fancy-display displays diary entries and holidays by
copying them into a special buffer that exists only for the sake of
display. Copying diary entries 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.
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.
The fancy diary buffer enables View mode (see View Mode).
The alternative display method diary-simple-display shows the
actual diary buffer, and uses invisible text to hide entries that don’t
apply. Holidays are shown in the mode line. The advantage of this
method is that you can edit the buffer and save your changes directly to
the diary file. This method is not as flexible as the fancy method,
however. For example, it cannot sort entries. Another disadvantage is
that invisible text can be confusing. For example, if you copy a region
of text in order to paste it elsewhere, invisible text may be included.
Similarly, since the diary buffer as you see it is an illusion, simply
printing the buffer may not print what you see on your screen.
For this reason, there is a special command to print hard copy of the
diary buffer as it appears; this command is M-x
diary-print-entries. It works with either display method, although
with the fancy display you can also print the buffer like any other. To
print a hard copy of a day-by-day diary for a week, position point on
the first day of the week, type 7 d, and then do M-x
diary-print-entries. As usual, the inclusion of the holidays slows
down the display slightly; you can speed things up by setting the
variable diary-show-holidays-flag to nil.
This command prepares a temporary buffer that contains only the diary
entries currently visible in the diary buffer. Unlike with the simple
display, the other irrelevant entries are really absent, not just
hidden. After preparing the buffer, it runs the hook
diary-print-entries-hook. The default value of this hook sends
the data directly to the printer with the command lpr-buffer
(see Printing Hard Copies).
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 edit the diary entries as they appear in the simple diary
window, but it is important to remember that the buffer displayed
contains the entire diary file, with portions of it concealed
from view. This means, for instance, that the C-f
(forward-char) command can put point at what appears to be the
end of the line, but what is in reality the middle of some concealed
line.
Be careful when editing the diary entries in the simple display!
Inserting additional lines or adding/deleting characters in the middle
of a visible line cannot cause problems, but editing at the end of a
line may not do what you expect. Deleting a line may delete other
invisible entries that follow it. Before editing the simple diary
buffer, it is best to display the entire file with s
(diary-show-all-entries).
The following features only work with the fancy diary display.
You can use the normal hook diary-list-entries-hook to sort
each day’s diary entries by their time of day. Here’s how:
(add-hook 'diary-list-entries-hook 'diary-sort-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. Note how the sort command is placed at the end of the hook list, in case earlier members of the list change the order of the diary entries, or add items.
You can write ‘comments’ in diary entries, by setting the
variables diary-comment-start and diary-comment-end to
strings that delimit comments. The fancy display does not print
comments. You might want to put meta-data for the use of other packages
(e.g., the appointment package,
see Appointments)
inside comments.
Your main diary file can include other 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 starting with diary-include-string:
#include "filename"
include 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 'diary-list-entries-hook 'diary-include-other-diary-files) (add-hook 'diary-mark-entries-hook 'diary-mark-included-diary-files)
The include mechanism works only with the fancy diary display, because simple 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. Sexp entries should be
preceded by diary-sexp-entry-symbol (default ‘%%’) in the
diary file. With 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 diary 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 2012) Renew medication (%d%s time)
looks like this:
Renew medication (5th time)
in the fancy diary display on September 7, 2012.
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 ‘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 (meaning 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
after the first day 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 on or after/before day of month; 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.
The sexp diary entry applies to a date when the expression’s value
is non-nil, but some values have more specific meanings. If
the value is a string, that string is a description of the event which
occurs on that date. The value can also have the form
(mark . string); then mark specifies how to
mark the date in the calendar, and string is the description of
the event. If mark is a single-character string, that character
appears next to the date in the calendar. If mark is a face
name, the date is displayed in that face. If mark is
nil, that specifies no particular highlighting for the date.
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 (cadr 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)Make a diary entry for today’s local times of sunrise and sunset.
%%(diary-lunar-phases)Make a diary entry for the phases (quarters) of the moon.
%%(diary-day-of-year)Make a diary entry with today’s day number in the current year and the number of days remaining in the current year.
%%(diary-iso-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent ISO commercial date.
%%(diary-julian-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Julian calendar date.
%%(diary-astro-day-number)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent astronomical (Julian) day number.
%%(diary-bahai-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Bahá’í calendar date.
%%(diary-chinese-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Chinese calendar date.
%%(diary-coptic-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Coptic calendar date.
%%(diary-ethiopic-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Ethiopic calendar date.
%%(diary-french-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent date on the French Revolutionary calendar.
%%(diary-hebrew-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Hebrew calendar date.
%%(diary-islamic-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Islamic calendar date.
%%(diary-mayan-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Mayan calendar date.
%%(diary-persian-date)Make a diary entry with today’s equivalent Persian calendar date.
For example, 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 literal line ‘&%%(diary-hebrew-date)’ appears in the diary for any date.)
This function has been used to construct certain standard Hebrew sexp diary entries:
%%(diary-hebrew-rosh-hodesh)Make a diary entry that tells the occurrence and ritual announcement of each new Hebrew month.
%%(diary-hebrew-parasha)Make a Saturday diary entry that tells the weekly synagogue scripture reading.
%%(diary-hebrew-sabbath-candles)Make a Friday diary entry that tells the local time of Sabbath candle lighting.
%%(diary-hebrew-omer)Make a diary entry that gives the omer count, when appropriate.
%%(diary-hebrew-yahrzeit month day year) nameMake a diary entry marking the anniversary of a date of death. The date is the Gregorian (civil) date of death. The diary entry appears on the proper Hebrew calendar anniversary and on the day before. (The order of the parameters changes according to the calendar date style; for example in the European style to day, month, year.)
%%(diary-hebrew-birthday month day year)Make a diary entry for a birthday on the Hebrew calendar.
All the functions documented above take an optional argument mark which specifies how to mark the date in the calendar display. If one of these functions decides that it applies to a certain date, it returns a value that contains mark, as described above.