Protesilaos Stavrou

Emacs: institution-calendar package (University of Oxford/Cambridge, etc.)

Oxford calendar for Emacs

This is about a new package of mine: institution-calendar. It is not going to be available on GNU ELPA. Users will have to install it from source (code for this is further below). The reason is that the predecossor to this package, oxford-calendar, was not accepted:

I will consider my options going forward, with whatever that means for all my packages.

Overview

The institution-calendar package augments the M-x calendar buffer to include indicators about the applicable term. Each term has week numbers, which are displayed on the side of the regular calendar data.

The user option institution-calendar-entity specifies which institution’s data to use. Currently, the value can be either oxford-university or cambridge-university. Contact me and I will add support for your institution.

Each term shows the week numbers it formally defines. For example, the University of Oxford has three terms of 8 weeks each. When the user option institution-calendar-include-extra-week-numbers is set to a non-nil value, then an additional two weeks are added: week 0 for one week before the term starts and an extra number after the term ends. This is useful for scheduling purposes, such as to arrange meetings in preparation of the work ahead or to report on what happened.

The user option institution-calendar-include-intermonth-header writes text above the institution’s week indicators. This makes it a bit easier to tell them apart from the regular calendar data.

Showing the calendar

Enable the minor mode institution-calendar-mode to make all future calls to M-x calendar use the relevant institution data.

If you do not want to affect the M-x calendar output, then use the command institution-calendar: it is functionally equivalent to having the aforementioned minor mode enabled, except it has no permanent effect on M-x calendar—that will keep its original appearance.

If, for whatever reason, you need to check the calendar of a specific institution, then do M-x institution-calendar-cambridge-university or M-x institution-calendar-oxford-university (more such commands will be available to match any other institutions that this package will support).

Installation and configuration

(use-package institution-calendar
  :ensure nil ; not in a package archive
  :init
  (unless (package-installed-p 'institution-calendar)
    (package-vc-install "https://github.com/protesilaos/institution-calendar.git"))
  :commands
  (institution-calendar
   institution-calendar-cambridge-university
   institution-calendar-oxford-university)
  :config
  (setopt institution-calendar-entity 'oxford-university)
  (setopt institution-calendar-include-extra-week-numbers t)
  (setopt institution-calendar-include-intermonth-header nil)

  ;; If you want to permanently change what M-x calendar shows, enable
  ;; this mode.  Otherwise, use the relevant command from the
  ;; :commands listed above.
  (institution-calendar-mode 1))

Sources

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