I’ve been using Awesome for quite some time - more than 4 years already, and from time to time I needed a simple calendar widget - without any integrations, styles and dependencies, as simple as possible. I tried few but didn’t like them. And only today I finally decided to try to make such calendar widget for Awesome. It turned out that it’s quite simple. Here is how it looks like:

Calendar-widget

Default Awesome configuration already has time and current date widget based on textbox (~line 150 of the rc.lua):

-- {{{ Wibar
-- Create a textclock widget
mytextclock = wibox.widget.textclock()

The idea of calendar widget is to reuse mytextclock and add naughty notification with calendar to it when mouse button clicks on it.

Let’s find out how to print calendar. Ubuntu distribution of linux has handy unitlity cal which prints calendar for the current month with current day highlighted:

$ cal
     March 2017       
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  
          1  2  3  4  
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11  
12 13 14 15 16 17 18  
19 20 21 22 23 24 25  
26 27 28 29 30 31

Note that highlighting is done with some unprintable characters.

After I played a bit with cal I came up with following command:

$ ncal -3MC | sed 's/_.\(.\)/+\1-/g'
   February 2017           March 2017            April 2017       
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su  Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su  Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su  
       1  2  3  4  5         1  2  3  4  5                  1  2  
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12   6  7  8  9 10 11 12   3  4  5  6  7  8  9  
13 14 15 16 17 18 19  13 14 15 16 17 18 19  10 11 12 13 14 15 16  
20 21 22 23 24 25 26  20 21 22 23 24 25 26  17 18 19 20 21 22 23  
27 28                 27 28 29 30 +3-+1-        24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Some explanations:

  • ncal - is a bit improved version of cal. Here it is used because strangely in cal it’s not possible to make Monday first day of week, however it’s possbile in ncal. But ncal prints transposed calendar, so it’s needed to be printed in cal’s way, which is done by providing -C option.
  • -M makes Monday first day of week.
  • -3 prints three months (previous, current and next) instead of one.
  • sed is needed for current date highlighting - it wraps current date in + and - signs, which will be handled after in lua.

And now we just connect button click signal to mytextclock and call naughty notification with the ouput of a command above - just add the following snippet right after mytextclock declaration in rc.lua and restart Awesome:

-- {{{ Wibar
-- Create a textclock widget
mytextclock = wibox.widget.textclock()
local cal_notification
mytextclock:connect_signal("button::release",
    function()
        if cal_notification == nil then
            awful.spawn.easy_async([[bash -c "ncal -3MC | sed 's/_.\(.\)/+\1-/g'"]],
                function(stdout, stderr, reason, exit_code)
                    cal_notification = naughty.notify{
                        text = string.gsub(string.gsub(stdout, 
                                                       "+", "<span foreground='red'>"), 
                                                       "-", "</span>"),
                        font = "Ubuntu Mono 9",
                        timeout = 0,
                        width = auto,
                        destroy = function() cal_notification = nil end
                    }
                end
            )
        else
            naughty.destroy(cal_notification)
        end
    end)