Google calendar layer

Table of Contents

• Description
• Install
• Configuration
  • Configure org-gcal
    • Create credentials
    • Setup org-gcal
  • Configure calfw
  • Configure alert
  • Schedule events with org-capture
• Key bindings

Description

This layer provides two-way Google calendar synchronization using the org-gcal package and a dedicated calendar view using calfw package.

Calendar events are synchronized to your computer by org-gcal. They are stored in org format in one or several files user definable files. This allow the user both to include these calendar events in org-agenda and to create new events from any emacs buffer with org-capture. To learn how to setup and use the many features of org-mode see orgmode.org.

Your calendar events and TODOs (if you are an org user) can be viewed in either org-agenda or the dedicated calendar view provided by calfw. Calfw has daily, weekly and monthly calendar views and lets the user to easily create new events from the view itself.

Install

To use google-calendar layer.

1. git clone https://github.com/mhkc/google-calendar-layer ~/.emacs.d/private/google-calendar
2. add it to your ~/.spacemacs. You will need to add google-calendar to the existing dotspacemacs-configuration-layers list in this file.

Configuration

Configure org-gcal

To use sync your Google calendar with org-gcal you need Auth credentials from Google Developers Console.

Create credentials

1. Go to Google Developers Console
2. Create a project (with any name)
3. Go to Google Calendar API and enable the API
4. Click on Credentials and create a new “OAuth client ID”.
5. You will need to create a “Consent screen” that will be shown when you allow org-gcal to access your data.
6. After the screen is created select the Application type “Other”.
7. Click on Create Client ID
8. Save the Client ID and Client secret for later.
9. Go to the calendar setting of your Google Caldendar by clicking on the cogwheel icon in the top right corner.
10. Click on the “Calendar” that, which will display a list of your calendars.
11. Select the calendar you want to synchronize with. Save the Calendar-ID which is located in the section called Calendar address, following the ICAL and HTML buttons.

Setup org-gcal

Set the following variables with your Client ID and Secret.

(setq org-gcal-client-id "YourClientId"
      org-gcal-client-secret "YourSecret")

You need to specify which calendar is going to be synchronized to which file. The variable org-gcal-file-alist expect a list where each element is an associated list containing a Calendar-ID and which file to synchronize to, see example. If you want to synchronize multiple calendars its recommended to synchronize them with different files. This also enables the user to create events for a specific calendar. Currently org-gcal do not support synchronization of multiple Google accounts.

(setq org-gcal-file-alist '(("your_first_calendar_id@gmail.com" . "/path/to/first_schedule_file.org")
                            ("your_second_calendar_id@gmail.com" . "/path/to/second_schedule_file.org")))

You need to include the calendar event files in org-agenda, do so by adding the paths to the files to the org-agenda-files variable.

(setq org-agenda-files
      (quote ("/path/to/first_schedule_file.org" "/path/to/second_schedule_file.org")))

You can create new calendar events from any Emacs buffer with org-capture. This layer provides convenient accessory functions that automatically synchronize the new event to Google calendar, see below.

Configure calfw

You can configure how the calfw calendar buffer should be displayed by altering the variable calfw-calendar-window-setup. When you close the calendar view this layer tries to restore the previous window configuration, if you would like to disable this behavior set calfw-restore-windows-after-quit to nil.

Calfw lets you customize the name of the months and days by altering the following arrays.

;; Month
(setq calendar-month-name-array
  ["January" "February" "March"     "April"   "May"      "June"
   "July"    "August"   "September" "October" "November" "December"])

;; Week days
(setq calendar-day-name-array
      ["Sunday" "Monday" "Tuesday" "Wednesday" "Thursday" "Friday" "Saturday"])

You can also change which day the week begins with the following variable.

;; First day of the week
(setq calendar-week-start-day 1) ; 0:Sunday, 1:Monday

In Calfw calendar view you can capture TODOs or events. To do so you need to bind a org-capture template to the variable cfw:org-capture-template. The following are an example template for creating a calendar event that works with the google-calendar/sync-cal-after-capture function.

(setq cfw:org-capture-template '("s" "Scedule an event" entry
                                 (file "/path/to/a/schedule/file.org")
                                 "* %^{Description}\n%^{LOCATION}p\n%(cfw:org-capture-day)\n%?"))

Configure alert

Depending on your taste and OS you might want to set different notification styles. For macOS users osx-notifier or growl on older system might work the best.

Name	Summary
fringe	Changes the current frame’s fringe background color
mode-line	Changes the current frame’s mode-line background color
gntp	Uses gntp, it requires [gntp.el](https://github.com/tekai/gntp.el)
growl	Uses Growl on OS X, if growlnotify is on the PATH
ignore	Ignores the alert entirely
libnotify	Uses libnotify if notify-send is on the PATH
log	Logs the alert text to Alerts, with a timestamp
message	Uses the Emacs `message` facility
notifications	Uses notifications library via D-Bus
notifier	Uses terminal-notifier on OS X, if it is on the PATH
osx-notifier	Native OSX notification using AppleScript
toaster	Use the toast notification system

(setq alert-default-style 'libnotify)

Schedule events with org-capture

There are many ways to use this layer in conjunction with org-agenda, for instance you can capture tasks directly to the schedule org file for instance by using the template described above. To automatically convert the newly to a calendar event you need to also add the following function to the org-capture-after-finalize-hook. The function checks if the capture entry is put in one of the calendar org files, and if so creates an calendar event of the file.

(add-hook 'org-capture-after-finalize-hook 'google-calendar/sync-cal-after-capture)

For a calendar event to be considered valid by org-gcal it needs.

• A header
• A non-interactive timestamp or time range.

Key bindings

Spacemacs leader key shortcuts.

Key Binding	Description
SPC a g f	Fetch new events
SPC a g s	Sync calendar
SPC a g r	Refresh OAuth token
SPC a g c	Open calendar view

Changing the calendar view.

Key Binding	Description
D	Day view
W	Week view
T	Two weeks view
M	Month view

Navigation in calendar view.

Key Binding	Description
l	Go right
h	Go left
k	Go up
j	Go down
n	Next week
p	Previous week
N	Next month
P	Previous month
t	Today
g	Absolute date (YYYY/MM/DD)
TAB	Next item in a day

Actions you can perform in calendar view.

Key Binding	Description
c	Capture new event
v	Pop-up detail agenda buffer
r	Refresh buffer
RET	Jump
q	Quit calendar view