Re: What do people use for calendar invites?

[Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org>]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2021, David Mazieres <dm-list-email-notmuch@scs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Calendar invites and the text/calendar mime type seem to be getting
> increasingly important.  I asked about this five years ago and didn't
> get a good response, so I apologize for the repeat question, but I'm
> wondering if anything has changed since then.
>
> If you have found a good solution for integrating your calendar with
> notmuchmail, would you mind sharing what you are doing?  Some specific
> questions:
>
>   * What's a good way to generate text/calendar attachments from within
>     notmuch (especially the emacs interface, which I use)?
>
>   * What's a good way to apply text/calendar attachments to a calendar
>     from within notmuch?
>
>   * For those of us who hate gmail and love notmuch, but are still stuck
>     using and hating google calendar, what alternative solutions should
>     we be considering?

TL;DR I don't have a solution yet.

---

I've had this draft idea for integrating calendar support for
notmuch-emacs for a long time now. You'd have a command-line tool for
actually managing the calendar, and some elisp glue code to integrate
that to notmuch-emacs, as well as with something to pretty display of
the calendar. (I'm personally not a fan of org-mode, so I pretty much
ruled that out from the start for anything I'd use myself. YMMV.)

I got as far as writing the beginnings of a notmuch-like command-line
tool, "late", for calendar search [1]. It's actually usable for
searching, but it doesn't do much else. I'd like it to be able to
generate calendar invites and replies to them, in a way that's easy to
use from notmuch-emacs.

For the display of calendar information in emacs, I thought calfw looked
pretty [2]. It does seem to be a bit abandoned, unfortunately, and I
haven't checked the status lately. It wasn't too hard to make
notmuch-emacs display calender information using calfw, but to make it
more useful, you'd have to take the calendar in the email, combine that
with the user's calendar using the cli tool, and then feed it to calfw
to show the calendar event in context. And add bindings to actually do
stuff instead of just view.

I ran out of steam and time with this a bit, and anyway I don't have the
elisp skills for integrating this nicely to notmuch-emacs.

So the project is, uh, late. :p

BR,
Jani.


[1] https://github.com/jnikula/late
[2] https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-calfw