Address Book/Calendar Solutions for the Console?

Florian Cramer asks: "There are many good addressbooks/calendars for GNU/Linux (plan, ical, jpilot, kalendar, gnome-calendar, gnome-card, to name only a few), but they all require X11. Does anyone know a decent console-based addressbook/calendaring solution, perhaps even one which can sync its data with Palm Pilots? That would be great for all the vi/mutt/lynx/bash people out there, and welcome for (a) underpowered hardware and (b) future Linux-based keyboard PDAs."

Re:Give me a break

[nbvb]

Hey!

I still use a WYSE tube at work...

Not all the time, but at least half the time..

Why should I bother with 3D wingdings when Pine reads my mail just fine?

Pfft. Once you show me a GUI that manipulates text easier than head, tail, cut, sed, awk, and grep, maybe we'll talk.

Emacs

[Bazzargh]

emacs calendar/diary modes, and Jamie Zawinski's Big Brother Database for your rolodex. AFAIK there is sync software for this but as I havent used it now for 3 years I havent been keeping up[1]

-Baz

[1] Not because I didnt like it. I miss it today (sob!). However, because of a corporate misdecision our shop was having to switch to outlook mail (non-SMTP) and all that goes with it, so as the head of systems I felt I should switch - users kept reporting problems , but 'cos it didnt affect me I wasnt trying to find fixes hard enough...

abook

[Satai]

I swear by Abook for my address book needs. Haven't found any good calendar apps for console, so I use calendar.yahoo.com.

Abook even has hooks for mutt searching... ;-)

((And can anybody find any decent X11 apps? I never found one that made the grade.))

Oh yeah. I wouldn't recommend learning Emacs just for this... Driving a tack with a sledge-hammer.

/usr/bin/calendar & abook

[krismon]

On my FreeBSD box.. I use /usr/bin/calendar

It's simple, and it works... it doesn't nag, and everything goes in a human readable text file(it checks for a date on the start of a line and goes from there), you can even run it off cron to email you you're schedule for the day everyday. I don't know if the linux version has as many features as the BSD version, I know the Solaris one sucks...

I also use abook [sourceforge.net] (an ncurses addressbook program) for my addresses, it exports to mutt,pine,elm,csv, and is pretty easy to navigate.

Everything is console based and pretty easy to keep track of.

w3m

[Leknor]

Are you familar with w3m [freshmeat.net]? It is a text based web browser that does tables frames and lots of good stuff. If you're like me and lynx turned you off to text browers, do yourself a favor and give w3m [freshmeat.net] a try. Try it. It will turn any web application into a console application. (Except for those that use a lot of javascript but javascript sucks anyway.)

Leknor

Re:w3m

[sachachua]

W3M lives inside Emacs, which is pretty cool. =)

Links is a pretty good replacement for lynx. Links does tables, frames, threading _and_ downloading in the background, so if you're looking for a console browser, you might want to check it out as well. =)

Perhaps a web-based interface?

[spacewhale]

I looked around on sourceforge a little, and found several group-collaboration web interfaces using PHP, perl, etc. Here is a link to Office-Business/Scheduling [sourceforge.net] at sourceforge. If you're thinking about group-oriented things, some things there look pretty good, and you could access them with lynx.

As for PalmOS, there are some console-based apps that interface with the Palm. I don't know how functional they are, but I assume you could find one that uses a standard format like iCal. This could then be combined with a web interface or whatever else you can find.

My guess though, just from looking around, is that you'll have to separate the Palm synching from the scheduling app, I couldn't find a decently funtional console app that also syncs with Palm.

One last thing: why no GUI? I know what some say about the console-GUI debate, but it seems to me that there is just more you can put in a GUI interface.

Re:Perhaps a web-based interface?

[ryants]

One last thing: why no GUI?

I can't speak for the original question asker, but for myself no GUI is important since I often access my box via SSH on Winblows, so I don't have an X Server running (and even if I did, I wouldn't use it, since it would probably be painfully slow).

That's why I use (e.g.) mutt and not evolution.

Ryan T. Sammartino

Text Based PIMs

[mahabakri]

Hi.

Your first option is using EMACS or XEMACS. They have a diary, and simple database system built in. However if you do not like the interface I would suggest you roll your own.

The quickest option is to write a web based app that utilizes the following:
1)mysql or whatever db u like
2)apache
3) perl or php
4) w3m ( or lynx but w3m renders tables ).

I have used the above set up to write a web based checkbook manager and addressbook for my own personal use. Initially I had written it all using perl but I switched all the web based stuff to php. I still use perl for my addressbook since I can quickly look up addresses/phone numbers from the command line. I also set my text-mode screen size to 80x50. Combined with w3m it works really well.

Other options, which I haven't explored, is to use the curses lib with perl,python, or whatever language, along with some sql db. For these kinds of apps I think scripting languages are best. Faster development time.

good luck.