[Remind-Fans] Remind use-cases (was Re: two-way caldav synchronization)

[Dianne Skoll]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 06:00:06 +0000
James Cook via Remind-fans <remind-fans at lists.skoll.ca> wrote:

> -- I am more
> interested in a calendar that I can consult to see whether I'm free
> at a particular time, and may record some useful information, like
> the address of a hotel I'll be staying at.

That can be done with Remind, though storing a *lot* of information
in a REM line can be a bit messy/unwieldy.

> My events often span multiple days (e.g. a hotel stay) and I am not
> sure remind supports those well.

It supports them for some definition of "well".  Your options are basically:

   REM 2023-01-23 THROUGH 2023-01-27 MSG At hotel

or

   REM 2023-01-23 AT 00:00 DURATION 120:00 MSG At hotel

which look similar on a calendar but mean slightly different things.

> - I really like the idea of storing my calendar as a simple text file;

I like that too.

> - I'm curious to try out remind's expressive language and see if it's
>   useful to me;

That's the killer feature for me, obviously. :)  Writing my reminder
for garbage-collection day *once* and knowing that it will always be
correct is really nice.

> - it looks like there's a nice ecosystem of lightweight tools,
> e.g.  user interfaces.

Yes.  I use TkRemind, but there are curses-based ones too.

One thing Remind is *not* good at is obtaining a list of busy/free times
for multiple people and figuring out a common time when they're all free.
I've been mulling this over for years now and may eventually get around
do doing something about it.

Regards,

Dianne.