_And now, this: bfcal

I made something, and even though it’s tiny, and I suspect there a many other tools out there just like it (couldn’t find them, though), I would like to share it with you: it’s called bfcal.

I sometimes like to look at a calendar, e.g. when talking to people about when to do something. It doesn’t have to be a calendar that shows my meetings and appointments. I just want to know what weekday a certain date is, how many weeks until date X, etc. On the terminal, I sometimes use cal. But it’s not always suitable. Most graphical solutions are centered around the idea that you click e.g. the clock in your status bar to show a calendar. But my status bar happens to not do that.

While experimenting with GUIs, I realized that it would be extremely simple to build something that might come in very handy. So I wrote bfcal and bound it to $mod-c in my Sway config. Now I just need to press Super-c for popping up a simple calendar widget. It can be navigated with both mouse and keyboard.

That’s all it does. And that’s why I like it!

Because it is a GUI application I will grant you the obligatory screenshot.

Fun fact: I initially wrote it in Rust. But it just didn’t feel right for this use case. The stripped executable was ~7MB (now 19KB). And that’s for doing a bunch of unsafe calls into a shared library. Nevertheless, it is nice to see how much functionality is already accessible via the Rust Qt bindings. They do serve their purpose. This one is simply not it.