Re: Emacs Calendar - Removing holidays

[Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de>]

Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> writes:

> Correct.  But then I have additional dates I want marked anh have put them
> as holidays, but cannot get the christian, hebrew etc to stop showing.

I think I see now why your attempts failed.  Emacs consults the variable
`calendar-holidays' - and only that, when marking holidays.  When that
variable is initialized, the bindings of all the holiday-... variables
are appended.  That means that changing any of these variables later
does not have an effect.

So what you want is to change or customize `calendar-holidays' I think,
e.g. by appending only some those holiday-... var values, or specifying
your own stuff etc.  The variable should be bound to a list of holiday
style diary expressions, that's the only requirement.

You could also add the lunar phases there, but I don't think that would
allow you to change the color of the highlighting, you are limited to
one highlighting style.

Let me add: the code of calendar and diary is old, written in a style
that is ok but nobody would write it like that today.  And it has not
been touched that much in the last years, probably because we also have
org-mode now (and the agenda views, which offer a super set of calendar
features).  That means that the behavior is sometimes a bit more 70s
like than that of newer stuff.

I'm a fan of diary symbolic expressions.  They allow you to specify
anything that Lisp allows, quite powerful.  org-mode also supports using
them in time stamps or so.

Michael.