A Quick and Dirty Post about Two Quick and Dirty Calendars

The entire point of this post is that it’s short, sweet and concise, so I’ll this is all the introduction you’re going to get.

The two fastest ways of getting a calendar are:

Clicking on the time in your taskbar. The current month will pop out, with today highlighted, and you can switch between months and years as you see fit.

Using ‘cal’ in the terminal. This one requires a bit more brain power, but, like most terminal apps, is freakishly efficient. ‘cal’ returns the current month. ‘cal -x’ returns the next x months (obviously you have to replace x with a number form 2 to 11). ‘cal -y’ brings up all 12 months (the year) and ‘cal xxxx’ brings up the year xxxx (1937, or whatever). Too slow? Go to System>Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts and assign a keybinding to ‘Run a terminal’ (I use Alt-T myself) while you’re there, assign another keybinding to your web browser (I go with Alt-F, for Firefox). Now you can pretty much have an instant terminal…sweet!

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I’ll probably get some kind of comment about “Oh, well I use ___ screenlet, which just has a calendar on my desktop” or “Oh, well I used the following hack to get Google Calendar on my desktop.” If that works for you–great. But I for one like my RAM, disk space, performance in general, and not-installing-extra-stuff.