Calendar

I'm looking to use an old handheld computer as an organiser for managing contacts and appointments. While looking at Inferno applications, I found the wm/calendar application that I had seen before. This time, when I ran it, I noticed that it complained about a missing schedule:

cal: cannot load schedule: no dbfs mounted on /mnt/schedule

This shouldn't have been a surprise. The manual page for the application says that it is a simple calendar and diary program, and tells you how to run it with a schedule.

rawdbfs $home/cal /mnt/schedule
wm/calendar

You can create a new database to hold the schedule if you pass the -e option the first time you run rawdbfs — or just create a blank file beforehand.


Creating new schedule items

With the database filing system mounted, you can look at the entries under /mnt/schedule using normal text processing tools:

% rawdbfs $home/cal /mnt/schedule
% ls /mnt/schedule
/mnt/schedule/1
/mnt/schedule/2
/mnt/schedule/new
% cat /mnt/schedule/2
20211214 257
Started writing a diary.% 

Maybe this could be used for the purpose I had in mind for the handheld. I'm a bit skeptical because the user interface is slightly too large for the 320×240 sized screen, though it could be made to fit. The main problem is with the lack of keyboard navigation support in the widgets used and the device doesn't have a touchscreen. I don't see an easy way around that problem.


It fits... but isn't much use if a keyboard is all you have

I already considered that I might want to experiment with drawing directly on the display, and that only requires the draw module, so that's what I'll do next.


David Boddie
15 December 2021